 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am Krista Burns, your host here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is Library Commission's weekly online event where we cover any sort of activities in the library world or in Nebraska that may be of interest to Nebraska librarians and staff across the state. We do these sessions every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. They're free. They last about an hour, depending on how long we go, and they are recorded as this would have been. So if you have not been able to attend a live session, you can always watch all the recordings on our website. We do a mixture of different kind of presentations here, introductions to things, interviews, book reviews, mailing, train sessions, whatever pitches our attention, I guess. And we sometimes have guest speakers and we sometimes have our own speakers here at the Commission as we have today. Today we have Michael Sowers, who is the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Library Commission. And he's going to tell us all about feeds, how to get fit. You're hungry? Yeah, actually I am. That is your lunch sitting back there, isn't it? All right. I guess that's my cue. Yes, take it away. All right. Sorry. Good morning, everybody. It's Chris Dimetian. My name is Benovation, Librarian here at the Commission. And we're here to talk about RSS. Some of you have probably heard of RSS before. We kind of got some new initiatives going on here at the Commission trying to encourage a lot of use of RSS. So we figured it's a good time to have a refresher for some folks. For some of you, this is still pretty a new topic. So it's out there. So what I'm going to do basically is give you kind of the airplane 30,000 feet view of RSS here today. So if you have questions as we're going along, like we said, Chris is monitoring that on the laptop here. So just send those in as we go along. And I can assure you that she has no problem interrupting me. Yeah. So I've got about an hour's worth of material, but completely flexible. We've got time for questions. That's not a problem. But like I said, I normally teach two, three hour workshops on RSS, a basic in advance. So this is kind of the one hour version. So I want to stress that this is a very big overview of the topic. So what is RSS? Well, RSS is an acronym. You can probably guess. Depending on, yeah, we love our acronyms in technology, don't we? Libraries are not a mean to that. OPEC, anyone? Anyways, so RSS, like I said, is an acronym. If you really get into the history of RSS, which we'll do just a little bit and get into some of the things, it could be really simple syndication, rich site summary, RDF site summary. That third one's actually my favorite because it's an acronym that contains another acronym. Isn't that fun? But really, most people, if you ask or if they even care, really simple syndication is kind of the definition today that we use. It is an XML-based language for syndicating content on the Internet. So, Chris, I don't know. I'll ask you here. Do you remember Windows 95? Yeah. Windows 95 had something called channels where you could subscribe to content on your desktop. It's called push technology. Remember this? Yeah. It's that miserably. Okay. Because, I mean, mainly it was kind of two reasons. One bandwidth didn't really exist at the time. It was really bandwidth-intensive and you're a dial-up modem, 14, 4, 28, 8, remember those? Yeah. Bells and whistles, wait, literally. And the other reason was that it was, in combination with that bandwidth, it was that constant stuff was being sent to you. It was a very early form of syndication that you would subscribe to content. Well, RSS has kind of come along as an improvement to that and something that really worked. RSS did actually start back in 1997. I don't want to spend too much time on this chart here. It'll be in the recording and the PowerPoints you can download if you want. But the idea here is that RSS is a very long and tortured development history. And the problem is each of these blue lines is kind of another version of RSS. But if you see here, you've got back in 2000, there was something called RSS 0.91. But at the same time, there was something called RSS 1.0. Notice those are on different lines. They were different versions of the same technology. Version 1.0 was not an upgrade to 0.91. It was a concurrent technology under the same name. Two different groups doing the same thing. Two different groups kind of trying to accomplish the same thing. And as we move up here towards kind of the newer end of things, you'll see that we have different versions. RSS 1 still exists, RSS 2 still exists. Then there's something called Adam, which ended up coming out, which does the same thing but has a different name. Thank you very much. So actually, let me back up here just a second. I don't want to stress this too much. Just want to say that in a long and tortured history, you can read narratives about this. You find some books about RSS that are out there. The point here is that there are different versions, but today, the technology you as a user use to read RSS or Adam or feeds being the more general term really doesn't care which version is being used. It's kind of become transparent from the user's perspective. If you start to publish your own RSS feeds, then it may get a little more complicated as to which version you want to use. And we'll talk about that a little bit as we're going along here today. So how does RSS work? This slide is not nearly as complicated as it looks. But it did take me quite a while to actually put it together because I had to sit down and try to figure this out. Let's start over on the left-hand side here. You have kind of this circular loop for the information provider. Now, the information provider could be a blog, it could be a search engine, it could be a podcaster, any piece of content that they're making available via RSS. They create the content. So let's say it's a blog post. Keep it nice and simple. I write a blog post on my blog and then some code gets added to that that is the actual code that makes RSS work. Kind of looks like HTML, very similar to that. I have a slide showing you an example. That code is added and in my case, my blogging software does that for me automatically. Saves a lot of work. And then that gets put on a web server just like any old webpage would be. Yet another piece of content on the web. And me as the blogger, as the information provider in this case, this circle just kind of continues. I create content, the code gets added, it gets put on the web server. I create content, the code gets added, it gets put on the web server. And as I add more content, more code is added and this file just gets longer and longer. It's the same file that keeps getting updated every time. So me, my end, that just sits there. Then comes the user. Now, once that that content is on the web server in the RSS format, it gets a URL just like any webpage would. That person will subscribe to that URL using something called a feed reader or an aggregator, which I'll get into more details in a few minutes. What that aggregator is going to do is start this little process loop here. It's going to check for updates against the content on the web server and if it finds any new content, it will download that content. And then maybe an hour later or a day later, it will check for new content. And if it finds any, it will download the new content. This will just kind of circle around and circle around and circle around and then the person who is subscribed to it will read the new content as it comes in in their service or their software. So it's kind of this two-stage process, one stage for the information provider, one stage for the information receiver. With a lot of that work for the receiver being done automatically by some software or service, which is checking that that content that was sent by the provider. So I don't know if there are any questions about that. We'll keep an eye on that. We're checking here. I just want to make sure because this is kind of that. No questions. Okay, good. If you got one, another one, you run into one, please. By all means. Okay, what are the implications of this process? There's kind of four of them as I see it. One is all this different information is received in a single location. Let's again use blogs as an example. I read a lot of blogs. Chris, I know you read a lot of blogs. Almost two minutes. And before RSS, if you wanted to read a blog, how would you remember that you had to go read that blog again? You'd have this folder in your bookmarks called blogs. And every day, you would go back to see if there was new content posted. The problem is, it's not everybody posts new content every day. Or some blogs post new content every few minutes. And so checking became annoying and then eventually you forgot and you have to go to the next bookmark and the next bookmark and you're like, I don't remember. It's just annoying. It's not efficient by definition of the imagination because you have to go to each source one at a time. RSS will let you take all those sources and bring them into one location. So you go to one place and you read all that content you subscribe to via RSS. Information is received quickly. The fact that the software you're going to use takes over the process for checking new content means that the moment there is new content, you pretty much have access to it and you don't have to remember to go back and check it. The third one, which is great for readers but some information providers kind of get a little frustrated by this is that the need to visit the original originating website is reduced. So if you subscribe to the content from my blog and I've spent hours, if not days, weeks, or months designing the look of my website, you subscribe to that content, you don't see it. You don't care what my website looks like. You just want the content that I published on my website. I can go into an all-around discussion just on that issue but from a reader's perspective, you don't have to keep going back to the website. This stuff just comes to you. And finally, I think what is the big one, is the possible end of this. I'm a big person. I've talked about this before. Something called inbox zero. You can look it up. I tend to not leave things in my inbox. I think when I came down here, I had four things in my inbox. Christelle, you want to guess how many things are in your inbox? Fair enough. Probably not 99,999. No, no, not that many, not enough. But mailing lists. How many mailing lists are you on? I have a rhetorical question. Don't answer. I'm on plenty but I try not to be anymore. My inbox is for things who are really people who are trying to specifically talk to me. If those mailing lists I can get via RSS where they're broadcasting to lots of people, I find it a little easier to deal with it. Here's why. And I hate to say it's a heroin shift. Just don't ask me to spell it. Okay, so here's the email model. The email model is everything comes in and you have to delete everything you don't want to keep. Yes. How much of your email do you think you actually delete versus you keep? Which is more? You delete more than you keep? Probably. Okay, probably. Especially if you're on a lot of mailing lists. Okay, you know. I do a lot of work for you. Yes. Let's say you subscribe to 10 mailing lists. Most of that stuff you don't, you know, you like read, okay, I don't need to keep that. I don't need to keep that. I don't need to delete. And then you keep the things you want. And the problem is that's why your inbox gets so full. Because you're keeping all that stuff and some people are hesitant to delete things they don't really need anymore. Okay, well, some people are like, well I might need that in a few years so I'm not going to delete it. That's the email model. It's keep unless you delete. The RSS model flips that on its head. It assumes that once you've read it you don't want to keep it. Unless you specifically say I do want to keep it. So if an item comes in via email you have to say, well, okay, I don't want that. I have to delete it. You have to take that active step. If something comes in via RSS the moment you see it the RSS service you're using assumes that you don't ever want to see it again unless you specifically take active steps to keep it. So when we, you know, in a few minutes and I'll show you how many feeds I'm reading and you're going to see 500 unread items. I can go through those 500 items in probably five minutes because I don't, I just, by default I assume I'm not going to want to keep any of it. And there are ways I can email something to myself now it's in my inbox or the service I'm using I'm going to say keep this is new, keep this here until I go back and deal with it later. Or I can actually go to the webpage and book market it is a different way of looking at receiving information and it is a little bit of a hurdle to get over. But I don't ever want to go back. If I can get something via RSS or via email I will choose RSS every time. Alright. So what does RSS look like? Here's the fun part. This is code. I'm not here to show you all of this. This is kind of here but if you've ever done any HTML work with web pages this should look pretty much familiar to you. What I want to point out is just a couple of lines that are very important. And the first one I want to point out is right here it's labeled last build dates. Now this example is a little dated but that's okay. What's going to happen here is if you remember back to that process that software I'm using is going to check for new content let's say once an hour. All it has to do is it has to read about nine lines into the code and it's going to say basically when was the last time this feed was updated. According to this piece of code it was the 10th of May 2007 at 7.34 in the morning. We've updated our blocks but we'll just... That's when the screenshot was made. So it gets this far and it says to itself okay well the last time I checked the date was 10th of May 2007. Has the date changed? No. The software can just stop and not have to read any more of the file and move along with the next thing. So it's very efficient. If it does say hey wait well you know the last time I checked this is the 9th of May so it's now the 10th of May there must be something new it goes down to read the first item and each item will have a publication date and it will say is this item newer than the last time I checked? Yes please download it. When it gets to the next item in the list this example only has one but you know a real-life example would have more than one. When it gets to the next one it says oh well that's what I've already gotten I don't need to do it anymore it can stop reading the whole rest of the feed. So there's that bandwidth problem it's solved that that whole push technology in Windows 95 and Windows 98 had this is very efficient. It's text based you can have graphics things like that but it's got that concept of those dates and times built in so it knows when stuff is new without reading a lot of content. Okay so you're thinking this is a speed thing so pretty good how do I find them? Well there's a couple of ways we're librarians we like to search I like to search I like to find little nooks and crannies and things. There are some different feed search engines out there I've got a couple of examples one here is called FeedMill. FeedMill specifically looks actually for feeds not necessarily blogs but actual feeds such as the contents of feeds so let's say for example I know this is Nebraska we have some quilters yes including my wife so I'm not picking on the quilters and my mother so although my mother is not in Nebraska anyways there's quilters out there so let's say you're looking to subscribe to some feeds about quilting you can go to FeedMill search on quilting and it will find you feeds that are available on quilting there's quiltingpays about.com's quilting page quilting is my passion and actually what I really find interesting and you can almost do a whole session just on how FeedMill works is it's got this topic significance thing over on the right and these are slider bars so what it does is it looks for other keywords that were in these results determine how important they need to be in your search results kind of a very interesting interface you can adjust those so if patterns are really important to you you want quilting patterns you can slide that up and then your results will change based on how you set the importance level of these sliders and then there's all this how surprising or well known do you want your results to be how obscure versus very well known cultures it's a search engine, go play with it it's kind of fun your other option I find which is a little less searching more relationship based is blog roles blog roles are lists of blogs that other bloggers read so this is the blog and it's a little out of date from the screenshot but her blog does still exist called library web check you know we know library web check, we know Karen Karen Coons works for she's one of their uber geeks research and development yes and what she's done on her blog is she's listed the blog she reads so the idea is that I know Karen, I like what Karen posts on her blog, chances are I might be interested in some of the blogs she reads and some of the feeds she reads on her list and find the feeds for those things I have a blog role sort of on my website so you can see hey I like what Michael writes I might be interested in reading some of the stuff he reads your other option really is to look for the icon right now the fun part of this is there are actually literally dozens of icons out there all of these are examples I'll be honest most of these are not used anymore we've kind of come up with a standard which is this one down here in the bottom right hand corner this is the icon but look for orange that's kind of the default color going on here you know it's like when all the blogs did everything differently or excuse me I hope the browsers did everything differently well early on everybody had to create their own unique icon and there are variations you can use some cutesy ones a little guy reading a newspaper with this icon on the newspaper but basically this is that icon you're looking for and chances are your browser already supports this icon so if you get to a page that has a feed you might see this icon in your address bar now what you do with it we'll get to that in a few minutes just want to take a moment to talk about podcasts podcasts we have one we have one for the Nebraska Library Commission here called the Encompass Podcast that podcasts are audio and video content delivered via RSS that's really what it is and it uses a code in RSS 2.0 called enclosure it's kind of like an attachment for an email this is where I said a little earlier that the version doesn't matter until you're creating content this is one example where creating content the version is important it has to be RSS version 2.0 because that's the only one that supports enclosures iPods are not necessary I will stress this we can do a whole other session on podcasting in fact we've been talked about it but what you can then do just as an example here you can use something like iTunes or many other programs you do not have to use iTunes to actually subscribe to RSS based audio and video content that's a podcast in a nutshell so just a quick example of some notable feeds these are some of my favorites that I like to pay attention to over here on the left hand side we have all library examples library.net just in its west blog LIS news shifted library Jenny Levine's blog she's at ALA my blog I kind of view it as a favorite pardon me I kind of enjoy it tamed the web from Michael Stevens at Dominican University unshell the comic strip you can subscribe to that via RSS paper cuts this is just a great example of a blog at the Tabika Shawty County Public Library and to be honest I'm not sure it's called paper cuts I need to check that we'll get back to you on that one I seem to think of their last redesign they might not have called it that anymore over on the left some technical stuff there's another one called Gadget these are gadgets and gizmos and technology security now inside the net and this week in tech these are all great technology audio podcasts that I listen to on a very regular basis boing boing.net random would be kind of the best way to describe the content boing boing but very random they'll do weird music they'll do all sorts of things Google News, ISBN searches delicious flicker, I'm going to show some live examples of most of these and if I remember correctly we will go live in just a second so here's the next thing we need to talk about I've been talking about the technology of RSS kind of how it works, what it looks like you want to read RSS what do you need you need something called an aggregator or a feed reader this is the software or service that you use to actually get this content into a readable format as it says here at the bottom it's what you need to retrieve and read RSS feeds let me just go through some examples and talk about why you need one of these if you don't have one of these and you want to bring an RSS file up on your screen a couple of different things might happen if you're an internet explorer 8 user and you bring up a feed file it will look something like this which does have this wonderful little subscribe to this feed icon if you bring up an atom file in IE 8 it might look like this which is readable both of these are readable but you don't get the automated features if you're using Firefox and you bring it up it's going to say do you want to add a live bookmark or something like that Chrome this kind of looks backwards but Chrome will just give you the contents it won't format it at all it will look like a mess people wonder Chrome if you're state of the art why does it look like this you don't have an answer I love Chrome I use the Chrome browser all the time this is one of my pet peas with Chrome so why do you need an aggregator well it's going to make it readable not so much especially if you're using an older browser if you're still stuck in IE 6 first of all please upgrade second of all you'll see something like this but with all the code mixed in great thanks that's a lot of help it will gather the content of all of your feeds into a single location it will check for updates automatically it will notify you of new information it will display only that new information for you by default and it will most likely allow you to sort of save all of that information really big benefits there are different types of aggregators let me just show a couple of examples of those first of all you can install something like feed reader which is a client it's kind of like email you actually install it on your machine it's an individual piece of software it only does feed reads not my favorite way of doing things it's the last thing I need is a single piece of software that does only one thing and by the way I then need to be on that particular computer which has that piece of software in order to be able to read my content not exactly very mobile if you are a Firefox user you can do this in your browser they will they have a technology called live bookmarks and as you see here I am on a page it has an RSS feed so I would click on that icon it would say add live bookmark excuse me it will bring up that title and then over my sidebar I can open up my bookmarks and I can see my RSS folder and there is the digital photography school feed and then there is all these things I haven't read yet it's putting RSS into a bookmarks format I don't find it very useful this is my one big complaint about Firefox as a browser is how it handles RSS feeds if you are an IE8 user this actually is pretty darn efficient this is the one thing I like about an IE8 is how it handles feeds you get to that page that I showed you earlier where it says subscribe to this feed you click on that it will say ok what do you want to call it you put it in the feeds folder you click subscribe and then when you open your sidebar you will get a list of the feeds you have subscribed to and when you click on it it will show you the items over here on the right that you haven't read yet really handy it works quite well the problem is you are still linked to this particular computer and that particular browser now if you are the type of person who does all of your work on one computer at your desk and you never do anything at home you only do it at work now some people I know and one of these set up at home and one of these set up at work and they have very different feeds subscribed to so you don't accidentally read the home stuff while you are at work and you don't accidentally read the work stuff while you are at home exactly that can work so I don't get distracted by fun things or friends blogs and when I am at home I don't get distracted by work I don't want to read those when I am at home and unfortunately for me not that simple I do try to avoid the purely fun stuff at work but sometimes the fun stuff is related to exactly what I am doing at work because I have a really weird job on shelf it's a webcomic about working in a public library so I think that's really shelf check is another one shelf check yes also there is very relevant comments about it now what I use is Google Reader there is another one out there called bloglines which I have talked about a lot in the past I just recently switched to Google Reader for various reasons for a Google Reader now but bloglines is still a perfectly good solution I want to stress that I am not dissing bloglines but I am distracted this solves all of my issues it's web based I can get to it from any internet connected device including my phone I can do it anywhere as long as I have an internet connection the stuff I know I really should not be reading at work I stick in a folder it's kind of my methodology I'm very good about that if it's in that folder I can't read it so let me go live this is my note to say now's the time to go live alright so let me get to the right screen here I have logged into Google Reader and I'm going to do a little bit of a refresh here just to make sure that's up to date I could spend the next hour I'm not going to do that but if you do have some specific questions you can ask them I've also been very careful not to try to read any of my feeds this morning so I'm behind already so these numbers might look kind of large to some of you I'm going to close some of this up here one of the things I do like about Google Reader is you can follow other Google Reader users and things that they pay attention to so here's Scott Childers over at UNL and he has shared something through that through Google Reader so I can kind of highlight the fact that he has shared that and I say he has shared a collection of blogs and websites on a particular topic bundles this is a new feature I've never heard of those we'll have to do another section so now over here it says I have one unread item from Scott if I click on that I can now read it but notice that has disappeared it's from over here on the left it assumes I've read it and I don't want to keep it but I can start it I can like it I can share it I can delete it I can email it I can say keep it unread I can send it to another service I can share it to the people who are following me with a note but it assumes that I've read it I no longer care it's gone and notice he posted this 24 minutes ago here's one from Andrew I don't remember where Andrew is I'm liking and here's some useful resources to help you learn HTML5 well I've just read it and it's just disappeared but that's something I'm interested in so what I'm going to do is I'm going to scroll down to the bottom of this post and I'm going to say you know what keep this unread watch what happens it now says you have one unread item so if I move along it'll still be there the next time I come back and then I can go ahead here and sort things into folders these are now all different feeds you start you start following a lot of stuff you really do organize just like in your email you can publish your email do it here too so for example I have a books and authors folder and under that I have here's one of the chat skin files an author I pay attention to he writes a lot about ebooks and publishing and I have one unread item and I follow tor.com science fiction and fantasy publisher four unread items just to click on tor.com here it will say okay here's the first one notice that just went down to three because I've read it I go to the next item it comes down to two the next item goes down to one the next item it says hey you know you've read everything and this will update itself automatically every few minutes or if I really want I can say you know what refresh now because I'm impatient it's kind of like checking your inbox any of you admit it say check me mail, check me mail, check me mail I can just click subscriptions it says refreshing and my numbers will automatically update really, really so let me talk for a few minutes about how to find some feeds and subscribe to them and I will use Google Reader as my example your actual subscription instructions will vary depending on which reader or aggregator you use this is a general process I want to talk about here so let's say for example you find this wonderful blog called the Traveling Librarian okay that's my blog and there's Shelf Check another great web cover about libraries so you look for the orange RSS icon and because we've kind of scratched my screen here, here's one subscribe, notice it's also up here so what I'm going to do now if you use the one in your address bar you generally want to do a little setup where you integrate I've told my browser on my desktop on my office and at home if I click on that icon please use Google Reader in this case this is one of our staff computers I haven't done that so really what I'm going to do here is I'm just going to right click on that icon and say copy link and I'm going to go back over to Google Reader click add a subscription paste that URL in there click add I might actually say I'm already subscribed in fact since nothing happened there we go and it says you have subscribed to it yay and I have no unread items actually I think it's because I'm already subscribed but I can view them and if I click on view here's some stuff that I have posted to that feed including some photos, there's the comic book some other photos I've actually done some magic things to my feed and make different sources come into one actual log feed Builderith Public Library I want to mention them their website went live this morning yay and they're part of a project that I also kind of want to plug here called Nebraska Libraries on the web that we're working with in the commission and because they're with that project they automatically have feeds their website is a blog over to the right here a little bit and look right up here there's that RSS icon again so I right click copy link go back to my Google Reader add a subscription paste it click add give it a sec it will say you are now subscribed to the Builderith Public Library feed it's usually a little faster than this there we go I subscribe to it and if I want I can put it in my Nebraska folder there we go and now it will show up in the appropriate folder and notice over here on the left it knows it's Nebraska and there's the public library really handy Flickr I didn't log in I really should have but let's just do a quick search on libraries it's a library and I want to know any time anybody posted a photo to Flickr with the word library in it that's a lot it's an example scroll all the bottom and there is no RSS link that's because I think you have to be logged in and have a Flickr account to get the RSS feed for a search result so if you give me one second here I will do that because I remember my password I can remember my username please don't remember that okay so let's search library again well you know what I can show you it still does work in another way let's say you find this guy named the travel librarian he takes really great photos oh by the way he takes a lot of photos and I want to know whenever he posts a new photo that I can do if I scroll all the way down there's our RSS feed I think for a search you have to go through another process and I forgot but I can subscribe to his latest photos okay again right click copy go back over to google where you're pasted right in you're subscribed Wikipedia does also have RSS feeds so let's say you are interested in the 2008 Japanese Grand Prix I don't know why it's this there in this case it's going to be a little different Wikipedia I found out as I was looking at this this morning you have to use the link in your browser they don't have an actual icon on the page like the previous examples have done so in theory I would click on this and it would say um okay what do you want to do I'm in firefox and I can say you know what I want to subscribe via google so I change that to google I click right now and it says okay when I add it to google reader and then since I'm already logged in it will do that for me so that's kind of what that process looks like um what are I think I have three more quick examples here uh and then I think we'll just generally open it up for questions uh Twitter search we talked about Twitter in many other presentations you know Chris and I are fans of Twitter in fact as you may have noticed from the interest slides prior to recording we've set up a twitter hashtag for that and I think we've been getting a couple of people and so you're thinking to yourself okay I want to know whatever somebody talks about in compass life but you know what I really don't want to sign up for twitter account you know I'm just not convinced okay and you know if we can't convince you I don't know who can but I'm just not convinced so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to search for what it says no and comp lot we set it up last week so we're still here two weeks ago okay so I'm going to do that search and cross my fingers that this all works and hey there's you a couple of you who have been tweeting so far today great over here on the right feed for this query so what am I going to do I'm going to copy link location I'm going to go over here my subscription click that and what we should get after a few moments and there we go and comp live twitter and here is the posts that are coming in so handy-gandy you can do this with google news so um old breath Alaska and I live in hillbeth I know what's going on I want to just get the heads up I did my search and if I scroll down here here's the rss feed for that search now yes so you never know where that little rss icon is going to be it's basically a scroll up and down until you figure out what you're putting I mean I'm really though if you're using a current browser you're going to look up here in your address bar it's just using it in your address bar depending on your browser you know if you're using chrome firefox or ie you're going to want to set it up so that it works with a particular service you're using whether it's blog lines or google readers or the built-in feature so I'm really kind of doing it a little more manually than I would do it in real life but Chris's point is completely obvious completely correct and that if you are looking for the links on the actual webpage itself it could be up to the side, it could be at the bottom it could be on the left, it could be on the right just kind of look for it sometimes we'll have the word rss sometimes we'll just have the icon sometimes we'll say feed sometimes we'll say subscribe keep an eye out it's there excuse me for just a second okay last example I want to show and then I think we're going to kind of open it up for questions here PubMed this one is this applies necessarily to anybody here but PubMed is a great medical resource from the government peer reviewed stuff wonderful wonderful things and you can subscribe to the content so here's the example I like to give you're at a campus and you have a medical school and so you know that you've got some professors who are researching particular topics and let's say one of the research topics is gout something I know a little too well unfortunately and so I'm the librarian and I say hey we've got professor X over there and he's researching gout so I'm going to set up a search here in PubMed on gout I'll do that little search and it will come up and then I can subscribe to that rss feed right here I'm going to go ahead and do my copy I'm going to go back to my reader add that subscription set in there click add and I now have a PubMed search feed for gout and whenever new content appears I will be notified so what you do is we'll bring up some content here and then you as a librarian I'm going to read these and go well that just kind of mentions gout but this one is like the latest study on gout treatments that professor might want to know about it so I could literally I could bring up I can actually let's see if I click here I can actually bring that webpage up and I could say hey and then I could send the URL this way or I could go back to Google Reader and just say email to Professor X Ross X yes I know X-Men jokes at X-Men.com and send that off to Professor X and add a little note here this is found this great article for you thought you might be interested we will press your faculty totally any of your patrons I mean in public libraries I talk about you know you've got those business people for research purposes all the time yes you can teach them how to set this up but you can set it up and then you can send them the information the best one let's talk advocacy for just a moment your mayor find out what your mayor is interested in even if it's not mayor related you know he might be into ATVs or hunting or something find yourself a good search engine that has RSS attached to it set up that search subscribe to the results you find something new send it off to the mayor make yourself indispensable okay say you know what I know what you're into I'm a librarian and I can find stuff and so when it comes to budget the mayor is going to think hey the librarian yes the librarian said to me all sorts of good stuff I shouldn't probably cut their funds it's a theory it's a very good theory it is something to think about so that's pretty much it now I can do a whole other presentation on you want to publish feeds but I think that would be a whole other session I think at this point really what I want to stress is yeah this is why should you care about RSS how do you actually subscribe to RSS content and what sort of uses can you get from it okay so I'm actually going to cancel this email and I'm also going to unsubscribe from this feed here just to kind of give you an idea of how that works if you're in just change or something you're not locked into these things right oh yeah totally and there I just subscribed from it and that accidentally came up and Google Reader itself will do lots of other things if you've got questions send them in I'm just going to vamp for a couple of minutes here yeah feel free to if you want to raise your hand for questions or just type right into the questions section in the webinar interface or if you're over there on Twitter send a question or comment through Twitter I'm monitoring that as well just add the hashtag pound and comp live and then I'll see you you can do things here for example here are things that I've shared out to people these are the things that I've shared recently here are the things I've starred so I might want to get back to them a little later it will actually keep statistics on how many things you read and how fast you read them and all sorts of yeah I don't look that much actually there's a browse there is find other feeds like this one I mean there's all sorts of features in here and all of them also does have that and we have a question it's actually two questions two questions this is Julie Marlowe asked when you follow someone are you just following their blog or do you have the ability to see all of their subscriptions or is there a way to share your subscriptions slash make them public okay let me ask the second is that question one let me ask the second question answer the second question first in Google Reader you can set what you've subscribed to is either public or private okay so most of what I've subscribed to is public so you can throw away that is completely blanking on me at the moment you can actually see what I have subscribed to unless I fade it private you can do that in blog lines too I have that you can do that in blog lines the people you follow is a little different the people this is when Andrew shares something that he has found in Google Reader I find out about it this is not following Andrew's blog if I wanted to yes if Andrew had a blog if Andrew has a blog I can follow his blog via RSS and that would show up here under subscriptions however what's going to happen here under people you follow in Google Reader is only things that they have specifically shared so let me see if I can find a slightly better example here I'm going to go to we'll think the Helders Public Library is safe for public consumption and I've said hey they purchased an early literacy station I think that's really cool I can go here and say share and if I click on share I can unshare it I can add a comment now anybody who is following me in their Google Reader account will see that next to my name so that that isn't if they follow my blog I would have to post that on my blog for them to actually see it that way this is just something for people who are following me via Google Reader I have a thing on my blog where I've I don't remember how I visited it a long time ago via blog lines it's a link to all to see my public account so if you're following me on my blog now let's say I don't know it's just over to my if you want to just say christenjoy.blogspot that's fine and then what it's okay it's got libraries and if you go down the right side put your photos let's just there's my there's my work blog role is about in the middle there so this is what I've done I have blog lines and I just put in the link for you and you can see in the URL it says public I've made my public and so this is where you can see all the stuff that I follow in my blog lines and I just put a link to it on my blog just to share that so people know here's some things that I follow professionally and I put it into folders and things and there's a similar feature on Google Reader I just don't remember how to get to it right off the top of my head and so now notice this is all the stuff that christenjoy has made public and it doesn't show you what christenjoy has actually read in each of these things it just shows you that she does subscribe to the Common Craft blog and you can see what is in the Common Craft blog but it doesn't tell you christenjoy has particularly read these items or not these items no they don't they don't really have a share I found Google Reader has a little more of the social features than blog lines it's kind of one of the reasons I moved over but as you'll notice blog lines looks kind of similar to Google Reader it's the same general functionality to it we do have a comment suggestion anyway when we do these Encompass Lives we have some of our staff here at the library commission are in a room downstairs and we have a request from them that actually we have here in Nebraska a set of databases called Nebraska Access and some of those databases that we subscribe to for our citizens do have that you can get RSS fees of searches just like you were doing in PubMed Wilson and books and print so you can subscribe to a feed for that search so you can be alerted just like what Mike was showing you about the gout one and color me embarrassed because I have completely forgotten to mention our own feeds here at the commission which is even in my notes if we go here we do offer feeds for the commission podcast, our blog things like that so actually if you go to the commission homepage in our case we do it a little differently instead of copying the URL for this icon you actually click on this icon and then you have all of the feeds there that are available so yes that was I skipped right over that I'm embarrassed and I apologize and oh yeah my job this is really two different things it puts out for our stuff our own content and this comment was about databases if you go back a page in our Nebraska Access which is right up to the second link which is a set of databases that the state library that we pay for on behalf for Nebraska citizens to use and you can do that same kind of thing using these databases Wilson and books and print specifically mentioned to get RSS fees and it says here as a comment great for students who start their research early LOL do you have any of those students or patrons who are coming in not the day before they want to know something it's a good thing yeah RSS feed is going to help you over the long run not in the next 10 minutes so yeah the paper is due on Friday yeah RSS is not not the best way to start your research so that's really what I wanted to cover including the thing I completely forgot any other questions or comments anybody have any questions Julie does say the answer to her question which is the previous one that makes sense okay good thank you we could literally do probably easily a one hour presentation just to help Google Peter works or just to help blog lines works like I said this is a really big giant overview and if you started, if you know what it's all about now you can jump in a little bit of knowledge yep give anything on your slide do you want to pop back to I think very last slide actually I believe it or not have some extra slides in here that due to time issues we are not going to get to but that's okay when the recording is put up and available this PowerPoint will be available along with it for you to go through all the slides download it whatever and any of the links that he used and showed today included as well and there is also on this particular slide a URL for some more bookmarks which has probably the last five years with the bookmarks regarding RSS so we will have a link specifically to the stuff we talked about today with the recording on our website but if you want to find pretty much like anything and everything Michael has ever bookmarked dealing with RSS for if you're a newbie it will probably be overkill maybe not the best place and feel free to send me questions there's my email address I do still get email I do accept that email has to be used I just prefer RSS if available people can't RSS your question that's true RSS is pretty much a broadcast media if there are any other questions it looks like we've just done a few thank yous yeah you're all welcome thank you very much for attending this week's and Compass Live I hope you'll join us next week when we're doing something that will be very specific to Nebraska libraries I'll tell you that right now Nebraska Access our database service I have a couple of new things coming in there Books and Print has a new interface Books and Print 2.0 and we have a whole new service non-fiction connection and Atlanta, Nevada, New Orleans the commission will be talking about those two new things coming to they're in Nebraska Access now so that'll be next Wednesday so thank you very much and we will see you next time bye