Thing #9 Finding Feeds

Thing #9 required that we use some feed search tools to find some feeds of interest to subscribe to. I already subscribe to a few, as you can see from my blogroll. But I do have professional interests in library marketing and information literacy, so I focussed mainly on those in my searches. I am a bit of a Neighbours fan too, but couldn’t find anything that really caught my eye. The new feeds I added to Bloglines are, 2c Worth, and EDUCAUSE CONNECT’s Information Literacy and Fluency Blog, which relate to information literacy, and Bronwyn’s Library Blog, (an Australian) and Pimp My Library, which I thought would give some marketing ideas. I also subscribed to Library Podcast! on how to create podcasts, for future reference if my library chooses to create a podcast to complement our self-guided tour.

Of the search tools used, the only one I found difficult/hard to understand was Syndic8, because it still appears to be in its early stages, and has no real structure. It is a community effort, and people submit their own feeds to the site.
Topix searches news and media outlet RSS feeds for recent coverage of stories. For example, I did a search on Harbajhan Singh, to see how the Australia/India cricket controversy was being reported throughout the world. I think this is a great tool.
Technorati is interesting. And I think it is something you would have to use a few times to understand what it offers. Of particular note, not only can you search for blogs and blog posts, you can see what is the most popular/becoming popular out in the blogosphere in categories such as Lifestyle, Sport and Entertainment. I can also see who has commented/linked to particular posts I find (giving it ‘authority’).
The search capability within Bloglines is very easy to use, as is the Google Blog Search Engine (like its parent), which I tried in place of Feedster, which is undergoing changes and is not available at the moment.

Generally, I think tools like this are good idea, as blogs and news sites are becoming “many and millions”, on a variety of topics. They are a valuable, current, constantly changing source of information that should be tapped.