RSS feeds, bloglines, and you (and me too).

Ah, RSS feeds. How useful you are! RSS is not a new thing for me; I already use an RSS reader to collect feeds from both library and game-related blogs. Well, I guess I can't really say that I use it these days, but it still exists. Sometime last year I decided I needed to keep myself updated with library-related news and figured that RSS would make this possible. I went out and subscribed to at least 8 feeds related to libraries! It was great, but at some point I stopped checking my feed regularly, and now there's something like 483 unread items. Nevertheless, if I actually disciplined myself to check it more often, I'd probably find it far more useful. It's great not having to remember to check 8 or 9 of my favorite blogs individually. When I use something like Bloglines, I can have everyone's blogs appear on the same page.

That being said, I was kind of confused that we are using Bloglines for this exercise because Google already has its own RSS reader called Google Reader. This is what I used when I first collected all those library and gaming blogs that I mentioned earlier. Since we all have gmail accounts, we all have access to Google Reader as well. I prefer Google Reader over Bloglines for two reasons:

1. It lets you choose to mark a post as "read" while looking at it on the screen. Bloglines, on the other hand, marks everything new as "read" once you click on the feed you want to read.
2. Google reader displays blog/news postings in the exact order they were posted, regardless of which blog/news site/etc. they belong to. Bloglines divides it into posts by each blog. I prefer the flow of Google Reader here.

That being said, I could be completely wrong about both of these, but I spent about 45 minutes digging through the options and setup pages to no avail. If anyone knows a way to do this, I'd liek to hear about it.

I did use Bloglines to subscribe to all the other staff members' blogs that I've already linked to from this blog. I also subscribed to three library-related news feeds. I created three separate folders so I could categorize things better. I have a "Library-related" folder for the 3 library news feeds, a Wellington folder for the blogs by my co-workers here at my branch, and a PBCLS blog for my fellow bloggers in the library system. Finally, I created a public area which allows anyone else to read the exact same blogs/news that I have in my reader. If you'd like to see it, go here.

Flickr issues

I've noticed that the pictures I uploaded to Flickr aren't showing up when I do a search using the "pbclsw2" tag that we were instructed to use. A quick search in the help pages seems to indicate that my account may be temporarily set up so that my pictures don't show up in the search results until Flickr determines that my account is not owned by a spammer.

Internet technology

One of the things that I've really come to appreciate lately is the advance of internet technology. As high-speed internet connections have become more common, it's much easier to implement various high-bandwidth services. Many of these are things I most likely would have scoffed at 11 or 12 years ago.

10 years ago I remember laughing at the idea of downloadable video, let alone streaming video. Sure, I downloaded a video or two every now and then, but it usually meant waiting at least an hour to watch a low-quality slideshow with nearly inaudible sound. Today, we have sites like youtube.

Communicating with other people from across the world was something I did a lot back then thanks to something called IRC, which was sort of the internet's first chat room program. Every now and then, I would actually have a voice chat with some of these people using a program called Powwow. The quality was usually pretty poor thanks to being on dialup, and there were other problems with it as well. In other words, it was not the most reliable program. Today, I have a high-speed connection and can use a program like Skype to have a voice chat with someone, complete with video if we both have webcams.

As a lifelong gamer, I thought the idea of massively multiplayer games you play over the internet sounded cool, but I didn't think my internet connection could handle such a thing very well. Sure, there were games like this around back then (Ultime Online, for example), but I didn't think such a thing could be handled very well on my dial-up connection, and I hated the idea of paying a monthly fee to play the game, on top of paying for the dial-up internet. 4 years ago, a game called World of Warcraft arrived on the scene and hooked me and millions of other people. It plays extremely well and it pretty much requires high-speed internet. (For what it's worth, I'm done with WoW for now, but I am certain to resubscribe again in a few months...)

It has also become very common for video game consoles like the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 to make use of the internet with online gaming. Going right along with this is the widespread availability of wireless routers which allow for game consoles to connect to the internet without having to string a wire across a room. Many of these online games also make use of voice and video chat.

Of course, there are plenty of internet-related improvements that I haven't talked about in this blog post. I'm pretty sure we'll even cover some of them in this 23 Things exercise.

Posting from Flickr!

Adult Section
Originally uploaded by sllwellington

Well, I made my first contribution to Flickr with this photo! I took this one in April 2007, a few days after starting my new job as a librarian. This was during a first-time visit to the branch for a lot of new staff. It's neat looking back and seeing the adult section completely empty. I might take a photo of this same area to show how it looks now, with all the computers and shelving in place.

....aaaaaand I'm back

I thought I could foil the Blogger spammer filter by creating my Blogger account from home.

I was wrong.

Fortunately, my blog was only down for a day, and so I am back.

One quick thing for my fellow bloggers

I noticed that blogger.com has all the timestamps set for Pacific time. You may want to change it to eastern time.

Blogging and libraries

Even though I'm one of the "tech guys" at my branch, I am actually pretty slow to embrace new technology. I'd give examples, but I don't really want to embarrass myself too much.

So I have to say that I'm not completely sure how to use blogging in libraries. I suppose it'd be great for keeping people updated on library news, especially if combined with an RSS feed. Patrons could subscribe to the feed and be aware of library events the moment they are posted. Of course, this requires people who understand everything I've just talked about, and I'm not sure that the majority of library users make use of blogs and RSS just yet.

Beginning at the beginning

Hi! My name is Steve, and this is my first post to my 23 Things blog. It is not the first blog I've ever had; about 11 or 12 years ago, I had a very small website which I occasionally updated with weird or amusing incidents that occurred at my library. I didn't refer to it as a blog then, but it was certainly blog-like. It has long since vanished into the æther, but I do still keep a small (private) blog of my own.

Anyway, because this is my first post, and since there are specific instructions to be followed for my first post, I shall get down to looking at the "7 ½ Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners."

I honestly feel comfortable with all of this. I don't expect any of them to be very challenging to me. However, I'm not completely sure what we'll be covering over the next few weeks. If we cover something like vidcasts or podcasts, there might be some difficulty depending on the availability of hardware and software. What I am definitely looking forward to is learning how libraries can make use of this stuff...and I suppose I'll have to toss in a few ideas about that in my next post!