Those clever folks at Google have removed one more impediment to a 'net-free vacation: Google Reader Offline. Now nothing can stop you from catching up on the hundreds of unread RSS posts while you're camping in the far woods, traveling to Tahiti, or just getting away from it all.

I'm not sure if this is good or bad cleverness, but it's definitely clever. To use Google's Offline Reader, you must be using Firefox and have installed Google Gears. Once Google Gears is installed, when you log into Google Reader you'll see a little green down-pointing arrow to the right of you Google Account name at the top of the browser window. Click the green arrow and Google Reader will download the full text of all your unread RSS feeds to your browser. The arrow turns blue (and upward-pointing); click it again to return to online mode. Going back to online mode synchs what you've read with Google Reader, so that if your flight's not long enough to catch up on everything -- or you take a nap -- you'll still have an accurate count of what's truly unread and read.

This is perfect for laptop users who want to catch up on reading on a long flight or a visit to network-deprived relatives. And issues a challenge to Bloglines (my personal favorite aggregator): can you top this?

I gave a talk at The Ohio State University's Library 2.0 seminar today. My talk was titled "RSS Basics and Beyond: Tips and Tricks for Getting the Most out of Syndicated Content." In it, I gave an overview of RSS, feed aggregators, and showed several easy ways libraries can take advantage of RSS to improve communication with their patrons, communities, and staffs. OSU has a copy of the handout.

If you're an RSS4Lib reader and will be at part two on Thursday, introduce yourself!

UPDATE 5 July 2007: OSU taped and digitized the presentations at the conference. You can see mine (RSS Basics and Beyond) or link to any of the others on the Library 2.0 Seminar web site.

As noted in my previous post, I'm attending a conference in Columbus, Ohio. While getting my morning coffee, I noticed a photograph on the auditorium wall. This hundred-year-old photo struck me as a particularly apt visual metaphor for the blogosphere:

Image from The Ohio State University Archives.

Look carefully. Here we have photographers, the 'bloggers' of the early 20th century, documenting their surroundings. But what are they actually doing? They're taking pictures of each other. And someone (the metablogger?) is taking a picture of the lot of them. It's the photogosphere! Each photographer is creating something unique by building -- in a very literal sense -- on the work of other photographers. And isn't that, at least in large part, what we bloggers do?

The University of Wisconsin libraries maintain a list of database vendors that provide RSS feeds as an alert option. With RSS alerts, once you save a search, you can receive updates via your favorite RSS reader (or embed the alert feed on a subject web page). You -- and your patrons -- will always have the latest database results. Where vendor provide help pages, these are also linked.

While some of the big database vendors -- Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, EBSCOhost, ScienceDirect, and SpringerLink, to name a few -- are included, it's surprising how few are actually listed. Alerts by RSS should be on everyone's wish list when it comes time to renew contracts with database providers. RSS alerts are an incredibly easy method to keep your patrons current on whatever interests them.

A recent study by the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda focused on International News and Problems with the News Media's RSS Feeds. While this study examined 19 major international news services, ranging from ABC News to The Guardian to Al Jazeera's English service, it draws some lessons that are applicable to libraries as well.

In detailed conclusions, the study noted several problems with RSS as implemented by the news organizations included in the study:

• RSS is not well used for tracking specific news topics throughout the day -- but it is well suited for a daily recap: "[I]f a user wants specific news on any subject from any of the 19 news outlets the research team looked at, he or she must still track the news down website by website."
• News services often only include their own content in feeds, not content drawn from traditional news syndicators like AP or Reuters. Relying on the New York Times' feed, for example, would lead one to believe that nothing of note happens throughout the day, between the press time of one day's issue and the next. USA Today, in contrast, includes other new services' content in its feeds, providing a more frequently updated service. "[W]hat is lost by the Times not sending the wire service articles are valuable updates on stories—and a breadth of stories that the Times can't hope to duplicate with its own staff ... which is, after all, presumably why they make the stories accessible on their website in the first place."
• RSS feed items often do not provide sufficient attribution to identify where that partiuclar [sic] item came from. "All the RSS feeds from the news outlets previewed their stories with a headline and a line or two of description, but very few of the outlets gave additional important information: the date the story was from, the story's byline (author) and dateline (where the story originated), and the time the story was posted." Since RSS feeds exist to be widely distributed, not including this basic information in a feed item can mean that the reader of it may not recognize it as valuable or coming from a trusted source.

Libraries should take these -- and the other conclusions in the full report -- into consideration. RSS provides a wealth of benefits to libraries that use it: ease of replicating content across a site, getting the word out, sharing news and information with community groups. Yet that value can be diminished if a few common-sense actions are ignored. When you build your feed, make sure that the serendipitous recipient of a given item can easily discern who wrote it, when it was written, and who published it. Give your reader the opportunity to recognize your organization's good name and reputation -- and your feed the opportunity to build trust and confidence in you.