The University of Western Ontario's office of Communications and Public Affairs offers a directory of blogs published by members of the UWO community. Not only is the directory a good idea, but they also provide a tag cloud that covers the content in all these different blogs. To see the cloud, look at the top of their main weblog page.

The tag cloud shows a summary of all of the blogs under this umbrella. Some are personal, some are project-based, some are from academic departments -- they run the gamut. The blogs may be on a UWO server or they may be hosted elsewhere -- as long as the blogger has let UWO know they're part of that community, they're included. Very clever.

The tag cloud itself is generated through TagCloud.com. I'd be curious to know if anyone has developed an open source tag cloud generator -- something that would take a set of RSS feeds and generate clouds... I can see that being very handy for a number of libraries, or other institutions. If you know of one, let me know in the comments.

Probably not new news for most, but EBSCO is now offering RSS feeds in their search alert tool -- so you can now save your frequent searches as RSS feeds.

Once again, Paul Pival at Distant Librarian has scooped me on a truly cool use of RSS to improve library service.

Paul wrote about Intuitive Revelations: The Ubiquitous Reference Model in AltRef, Brian Matthews' blog. In his article, Brian describes an experiment he conducted at Georgia Tech. The experiment followed 40 Georgia Tech students' blogs. He subscribed using Bloglines and set uph keyword searches for words such as "library," "assignment," and similar terms. When he found blog entries related to the students' academic needs, he posted comments in their blog pointing them toward useful resources.

Brian concludes, in part:

Isn't that what librarianship is all about?

FeedRinse is a web-based service that lets you filter your feeds. For the price of a free registration, you can filter up to five RSS feeds. For $4 or $6 a month, you get to filter more feeds and do more with them, depending on the level of your subscription.

Each filter can be fairly complex -- feeds that match (or don't match) a given keyword, tag, or author. So you could search the New York Times' headlines feed for all entries that contain the word "Washington" but don't contain the word "Congress" and are written by your favorite reporter. Your filtered feed list can then be exported as an OPML file and read in your favorite aggregator. (The filtered feeds are redirected through FeedRinse.)

What seems to be lacking from the service at present is a way to easily apply the same filter to many different feeds. But as Steve Matthews points out in his blog post on this subject, you can use other services such as RSSMix to do the building of a single feed, which then could be filtered through FeedRinse.

A colleague forwarded me a link to an essay ("The Endangered Joy of Serendipity") published in the St. Petersburg Times on March 26. In this essay, William McKeen, a journalism professor at the University of Florida, discusses what he describes as the loss of context that has come with Google, RSS aggregators, and much of the Internet. McKeen requires his freshman journalism class to subscribe to the paper version of the New York Times because readers of the online version will only find what they're looking for.

So what's the problem with finding what you're looking for? McKeen writes,

I agree with McKeen that serendipity is a wonderful thing. Heck, if you look at my career path to date (from Soviet Studies to archivist to techy librarian in just 12 years), you'll understand what I mean. But as our search tools get better -- and our RSS feeds get more specific -- what are we missing in life? McKeen writes,

This brings to the surface something I've noticed only subconsciously -- I rarely stumble on really cool web sites anymore. Back in the day (the first years of the web, 1993-1997), I would often find myself doing a web search on AltaVista and getting all sorts of hits that were something much better than utterly wrong: they were interesting. Now that I use Google (or today's AltaVista, for that matter), I don't find myself stumbling down the "wrong" path nearly so often. And when I do, it's not nearly wrong enough to be good.

The same is true with the feeds I've chosen to put in to my aggregator. While there's still some opportunity for serendipity in the not-so-random choices of my favorite bloggers, it's limited serendipty. By subscribing to feeds, I'm picking my headlines in advance, and somehow feel I'm missing good stuff. Even my keyword search feeds in Technorati and Bloglines are narrow (I haven't struck the balance between specific enough to be manageable and broad enough to be interesting). Again, I'm not necessarily looking for good stuff that's germane, but good stuff that makes me stop and think.

Which brings me, circuitously, to the role of libraries and librarians. As we build information systems to enable "Library 2.0," we must remain cognizant of overtuning the system. I certainly don't want to find just exactly what I'm looking for all the time. There are occasions -- frequently -- when I'm browsing and want to learn something orthogonal to my actual question. I just don't realize it until I've found the catty-corner path and gone down it. I suppose this is not that much different from the shift from card catalog to OPAC, but it's still a shift.

If we do not help people find what they didn't know they were looking for, we will, to quote McKeen again,