Kebberfegg is "a tool to help you generate large sets of keyword-based RSS feeds at one time." What it does is quite simple, and in that lies its utility and cleverness. You enter a list of tags -- user-supplied keywords to describe an RSS feed -- and select one or more subject areas (Medical, News and News Search Engines, Technology, Web Search Engines, etc.). Kebberfegg translates those tags into URLs that work at all the various sites that employ tags (i.e., Technorati, Del.icio.us, Google Blog Search, Daypop, etc.).

The list is either displayed either as HTML or as an OPML file. The HTML is OK for a quick review of RSS feeds that you can select from and add to your favorite aggregator -- an "Add to Yahoo!" link is provided for each feed. The OPML file is in many ways better, once you have honed your search, since you can import it directly into your aggregator of choice.

The list of sites that use some form of tagaloging is impressive in itself -- over 15!

Google has entered the RSS aggregator fray with a new beta product called Google Lens. I suppose the only surprise is that Google waited this long to release a product, even in beta. Weblogsinc offers a thorough review of the service.

Importing an OPML file is slow -- I exported my roughly 90-feed subscription list from Bloglines and had Google Lens import it. Ten minutes later, 7 feeds show up in my subscribed list in Google Lens. A new one appears ever minute or two. My groupings were lost, but it seems Google doesn't have the concept of "folders."

I wonder when this and Google Mail will be integrated?

Steven Cohen at LibraryStuff points us to the University of Pennsylvania's Online Books Page, and specifically to the RSS Feed for new books listed.

The Online Books Page -- completely new to me -- lists more than 20,000 full-text English-language books available around the Internet. While only the new books listing is available via RSS, the site itself lists them by author, subject, title, and LC subject heading.

If a site provides an RSS feed, it's easy to grab it for whatever purpose. (Perhaps too easy -- as the blogger at RSS Specifications points out, echoing Tim Bray's serious concerns.) But I digress.

What if the site you visit hasn't created its own RSS feed yet?

Several tools exist to meet this purpose. One I've just been clued in to (thanks Nick) is called FeedTier. Give it a web page and it will do its best to parse the page into content and fluff and create an RSS feed of the content. In a few trials, it did pretty well, though it erred on the side of omitting good content rather than providing unwanted fluff.

Jakob Nielsen, the well-known usability guru, offers a list of the "Top Ten Design Mistakes" for weblogs. There's lots of good stuff here, but the basic item to remember is that weblogs are web sites. Even if you're using an authoring tool (Movable Type, WordPress, TypePad, etc.), it's incumbent on you as a weblog author to provide information on who you are, to stick to your topic, to publish regularly, and to construct meaningful links.

The Neef Law Library blog at Wayne State University is using Shockwave audio files to record blog content. A slightly different form of podcasting, but it works very nicely without the 'pod' or iTunes. It uses ClassCaster as the underlying technology.

I gather that the ultimate use of this will be to podcast courses, the Neef librarians are testing it with other content. And since it uses Shockwave, a fairly common browser plug-in, it's pretty universally accessible.

Correction: 4 November 2005:
Elmer at Content let me know, very nicely, that I didn't do my research very well!

Thanks for the correction.

Steve Lawson blogged Internet Librarian 2005 and highlighted a very clever use of the weblog. While many libraries use blogs and RSS for library news and announcements, the Virginia Commonwealth University's libraries set up a short-term weblog for Black History Month this past February. In the weblog, the librarians highlighted items in their collections, resources on the Internet, images from their special collections, and events around the country in observation of BHM.

Special-purpose, short-term blogs are a simple tool for drawing attention to events or topics of short-term interest; with a small investment of time and resources (in terms of staff time to set up and maintain the blog, as well as add content) and a bit of planning, a library could easily generate feeds for other campus or local organizations highlighting the 'good stuff' the library offers on a given topic or event.