There are a number of tools out there that allow you to easily take someone's RSS feed and plug it in to your web page. The little-known secret is that at least one of them requires no programming knowledge beyond basic HTML and -- for the adventurous -- a bit of CSS.

Feed2JS, created and maintained by some clever people at the Maricopa Community Colleges, is a free service that takes an RSS feed you specify, wraps it in some CSS, and delivers it through a one-line JavaScript tag in your HTML document. Wait, it's really not even that complicated.

For an example of how this handy application works, go to my library's home page. Notice the headlines under the heading "The Ginn Weblog." Those headlines are drawn dynamically from the Ginn Library's weblog, the GinnBlog. Whenever we publish something new to the blog, the newest article appears at the top of the list on the library home page, and the oldest one goes away. Automatically. The code to it, provided through a web form at the Feed2JS site where you simply paste in the URL of the RSS feed, is simple:

<script language="JavaScript" src="http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/feed2js.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww322.pair.com%2F
ginnblog%2Fmt%2Findex.rdf&num=3&date=n" type="text/javascript">

(I also had to play a little bit with a CSS style sheet to make the headlines fit into the space on the library home page and to match the font, size, and color of type on the page -- but that was just as easy as adding a few elements to my site's style sheet using the directions kindly provided.

Maricopa is feeling the pain of lots of people using this script, downloading reformatted feeds from their site. If you plan to use it heavily, they'd appreciate it if you downloaded and installed the PHP scripts to your own server...

Feed2JS is a very easy way to take advantage of RSS feeds -- news, weather, your library's blog, you name it.

Let me know if you're using this tool on your library's site by leaving a comment with your page's URL.

Links (beta) is a group linklog -- bringing the tagging power of Flickr and Furl to the world of the blog.

From links' about page:

If you poke through the site, you can find all sorts of blog entries that Yale users have found useful -- nicely tagged and organized.

RSS4Lib has been linked in the WAG [Yale Medical Web Advisory Group] group with the tags rss, libraries, and blogs. It's not just a respository -- anyone (not just registered users) can also subscribe to the RSS feed for any page in the site -- so you can subscribe to the RSS feed for the WAG group, or for the "libraries" tag.

The Yale Center for Medical Informatics is developing this software -- unalog -- under an open source license. This might be very handy way for a public library to maintain a virtual vertical file -- rather than collecting pamphlets and ephemera by subject or organization, why not use unalog to indicate web sites and assign subject tags? It would also be a handy way to organize information from community groups or local organizations.

I stumbled on an article ("Geotagging Web Pages and RSS Feeds") from the January 2005 issue of Linux Journal. Geotagging is adding geographic metadata to web sites or RSS feeds. For example, a blog entry about a restaurant could give the location of the restaurant in any number of standard ways:

• Latitude/longitude (otherwise known as "ICBM," a term dating back to the good old days of early Unix and the Cold War), or by street address, or by city, state, and country.
• Using Geo Tags -- geo.position [latitude and longitude], geo.placename [natural-language name of the place], geo.region [ISO country subdivision].
• In RDF, the Geographical Vocabulary Workspace.

As the article points out, there are relatively few search engines that make use of this data, but among those that do are A2B and (for RSS feeds) RDF Mapper.

I haven't been able to find a library making use of this technology, but a couple things strike me about it. Wouldn't it be interesting to tag a local history or cultural guide with relevant metadata so that a search tool could pull together both information about the locations as well as where they are? Or to collect fiction set in the library's home town and include, along with the reviews of the books, tags indicating where the book's main action takes place?

Or, more broadly, simply tagging various library branches with geographical information might make it easier for someone to get from a GPS-enabled cell phone to your physical location -- via your web site.

I stumbled on an interesting idea through a longish clickpath which led me to Cataloging the blogosphere in Infomancy. In a nutshell, Christopher Harris proposes converting RSS items into MARC records using XSLT transforms. Which is a pretty neat idea.

I'm inferring from Christopher's post that this would be a valuable tool for selected, probably edited, sources -- he mentions the Librarians' Index to the Internet in particular as a good source; and David Bigwood of Catalogablog adds the Scout Report as another possible input. And I'll suggest the Internet Public Library as another source of vetted content for generating reference sites that other libraries might consider adding to their own catalogs.

How many libraries, I wonder, are currently adding web resources to their catalogs? And how many of those could use an automatically generated Choice combined with the MARC record for the resource? A one-click "add to my catalog" resource for librarians, complete with MARC data.

Why not put RSS feeds into a browser toolbar so your patrons have the latest news in their browser? That's what the Lansing, Illinois, Public Library asked and answered in the form of a very cool toolbar.

If you're using Windows ME/NT/2000/XP and Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher, you can use their toolbar. It's similar to the Google toolbar -- it provides a search box you can use on the Lansing library catalog, their regional library catalog, the web, or a variety of other sources. There's a link to Instant Message the reference desk.

And -- here's the kicker -- there are four RSS feeds built in. The library publishes four newsletters -- three by age of audience (adult, teen, and youth) and one for IT issues. These four feeds are listed in the toolbar. Clicking on a headline on the drop-down menu for any of these four RSS feeds pulls up the weblog entry in the browser. Very cool!

The Ebling Health Sciences Library at the University of Wisconsin offers a list of medical and science journals that have RSS feeds. The list of titles with RSS feeds. The library subscribes to the feeds and presents the most recent table of contents on the screen. Each article is linked through the library's proxy server to the full text content available to library patrons. And, of course, there's a link to the actual RSS feed from the publisher. (This publisher-provided feed, of course, does not link through the library's proxy server.)

Presumably, with a big more data massaging, the RSS feed could direct patrons through an OpenURL link resolver to the most appropriate source of the journal (online, interlibrary loan, etc.).

The Infopeople Project in California offers RSS feeds for its events calendar. The calendar draws from a variety of sources and includes individual RSS feeds for workshops, conferences, webcasts, and online courses. They list their feeds in one handy place.

While this is specific to California (except the library conferences feed), it shows a nice integration of a calendar, on-screen display of useful information, and RSS feeds.

Stephen Bell makes a great point in his 2005 ALA poster presentation, "If You池e Going To Blog, Blog It To Courseware":

I've described such RSS-to-HTML software in a previous post. And I'm going to try doing exactly what Steve suggests in our school's Blackboard implementation. I'll let you know what happens.

Or, in the words of Tim Bray, its steward, "It's cooked and ready to serve." Atom is another data format for accomplishing similar things to what RSS does -- promoting content, distributing "what's new" feeds, and so forth. What are the differences? Well, they're largely technical and largely irrelevant to the end user.

A couple of the features that differentiate Atom over RSS are:

• Atom has a standardized method of auto-discovery (of finding the feeds that relate to a given web page).
• Atom is an XML namespace -- which means entries can themselves contain formatted XML text without having to escape all the characters. This will be a boon to data reuse via webfeed.

The full range of differences is in an easy-to-understand comparison of RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0.

The key thing is that feed readers and aggregators will soon be accepting Atom 1.0 feeds (they often understand the current version of Atom -- 0.3).

Jim Robertson at the New Jersey Institute of Technology Library is pulling recent journal tables of contents into his catalog using RSS. In a recent posting to the Web4Lib listserv, he provides several links to see what he's doing:

Once you click through to the Detailed Record view, scroll down -- and there's the latest TOC for the journal (in this example, it's the Journal of Architectural Education). Jim is using ColdFusion to, in his words, "hack some interesting things in Endeavor's Voyager." He's also using Feed2RSS to turn the RSS feed into usable HTML.

More good stuff from Web4Lib: Several libraries have included RSS feeds from relevant sources in their subject guide pages. This makes bringing the latest information (whether that is articles, news, products, databases, etc.) to your patrons with minimal web page editing. Assuming, of course, that you have a source for good information that you can draw from, such as a trusted weblog or a database provider's 'latest articles' feed. Several examples of this sort of tool:

• Morrisville State College Library
• Georgia Tech (a couple examples):
• Biomedical guide
• Physics guide

Somewhat related, I'm working on a project that will eventually include RSS feeds for resources added to our subject guides.

Check out the University of Alabama Library's Recently Cataloged Titles Via RSS. Alabama faculty, staff, and students can subscribe to an RSS feed of new books as they are added to the library catalog. There are a whopping 325 subject feeds to choose from -- which should make sufficiently narrow topics that everyone will find something they want without feeling overburdened by books that are of no interest. I'll bet that as this catches on, new books will have an instant waiting list.

According to Douglas Anderson, who developed this application,

Doug adds that this is brand new, so he's not sure what the adoption rate will be on campus. But they're going to have several promotional activities during the fall term, primarily targeting faculty at first.

There's been lots of traffic in blogland about Library Thing, a service that lets you build your own personal catalog of books you've read, link to them in Amazon, pull subject and library cataloging information from the Library of Congress, and tagalog them with your own ad hoc subject terms.

Steve Cohen of Library Stuff, among others, beat me to the punch by suggesting RSS feeds would be a great add-on feature for Library Thing. And he's right -- it would open up collective book clubs, reading lists of your friends, and so on. And it's the sort of thing that libraries in general should be adding to their catalogs and patron services. Why not allow those patrons who wish to publicize their reading list to do so? Let them create book lists and tell their friends and family where their book feed is.

I've talked about lots of way libraries are making it possible to learn about new materials via RSS -- but what if you're an eager beaver and want to get on the waiting list the second the book is in the catalog, not when it's ready for circulation?

The Paranoid Agnostic writes about Using RSS and Z39.50 to Find Books Your Library Doesn't Have -- Yet. in a recent post. He offers a Perl script that will query his library's catalog (using Z39.50), find the most recently added items, and republish them via RSS. So he can then jump into the holds queue a bit ahead of the rest of the crowd.

He's not offering the code to the public yet -- but tells you to watch his RSS feed for details. The author promises it before the Access 2005 conference in mid-October.

Wally Grotophorst, Associate University Librarian at George Mason University's library, posts a small Perl application that searches his Voyager online catalog for a specific Library of Congress call number and returns the results as an RSS feed. He has an example of this feed embedded on GMU's Library Systems Office home page (appropriately, new books on programming).

Wally embeds the code in a page using Feed2JS -- but it would also be accessible to anyone who wants to track new books available in GMU's libraries by subscribing to the RSS feed. The feed has a simple URL structure -- in the example he posts, it is http://breeze.gmu.edu/cgi-bin/newrss.pl?QA76.

The Perl code is pretty straightforward though, Wally says, not particularly well optimized as yet.

First, some background. The Open Archives Initiative is a project to share the resources held in digital libraries. It defines a format for describing information about digital resources -- articles, images, sounds, recordings, or virtually anything else -- so that the holdings of various repositories can be easily shared among institutions. There are dozens of repositories, and hundreds of thousands of resources, in OAI-compliant digital collections.

The Ockham Initiative builds tools based on the vast (and growing) universe of resources described by OAI. One of these resources, just released, is a search tool that provides an RSS feed of the search results in addition to the static view within the web interface.

As an example, here's an RSS feed for an OAI search for RSS. Now this is a straight keyword search, so it pulls down some false positives (it turns out that "RSS" is a common acronym in other subject fields), but several clearly useful items are returned.

This is a great way to highlight otherwise hard-to-find resources on almost any topic.

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?

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.

Tired of checking all your favorite search engines and aggregators for the latest news on a given topic? MonitorThis, a beta service, has a solution. Enter your search and it will provide you an OPML file (which you can then import into your aggregator or feedreader of choice). For aggregators that let you put a bunch of feeds into a single folder, I'd recommend doing so -- MonitorThis gives you one feed for each service. One obvious way to improve the service would be to have MonitorThis perform the aggregation and provide a single feed for a user to subscribe to.

Google Base, Google's public-access database for whatever you've got, has at least one feature that's interesting from this blog's perspective: it accepts input in the most common RSS formats (RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 ). This according to the Google Base frequently asked questions.

Some blog tools -- I'm thinking of WordPress in particular -- use MySQL as a back end so already have the database aspect covered. But if you're using an RSS format as a way to get your data, whatever it is, from application 1 to application 2, and there's a need to have that data searchable, letting Google Base import the data seems like a viable solution.

For run-of-the-mill blog content, of course, this isn't really an advantage; plenty of search engines, Google's included, handle weblog content admirably. But for other stuff that's publicized by RSS -- bibliographic records of recently acquired books, new journal articles in a given subject area, and the like -- there might be some interesting uses.

Anyone doing anything with this who wants to share? Drop me a line...

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this myself, but I'm intrigued by Microsoft's recent proposal for a new XML format called "Simple Sharing Extensions" (SSE). What SSE does is:

So what does this enable, at least in theory? I can see services such as del.icio.us and Furl being enabled among smaller groups, where folks could post their bookmarks and share them via SSE in more distributed way. RSS feed collections -- through OPML files -- could also be collectively managed and published. What one person posts or edits would be visible to others, and so on. Does this create a Wiki-like service out of the more-or-less single-author blogiverse?

Lots more information is on Microsoft's Frequently Asked Questions for Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) page. The format, currently at version 0.9, is available under a Creative Commons license to enable experimentation and alteration. Very "Web 2.0" of them, if you ask me.

Wayne Graham, in a post titled RSS Information Visualization, describes a Java applet he developed to show, in visual fashion, the links between blog tags and content. See the graph of his blog (it will take a few moments for the applet to load -- be patient).

For his blog, each article is linked to each category in which it appears. From the map that's generated, it's easy to see that he writes mostly about XML and Cold Fusion, but also covers a wide range of topics. He describes the method he uses to generate the map in his posting.

A couple library-specific uses for this sort of tool come to mind. First is a book review blog -- with genre or subject area as the tags, and individual reviews as the blog posts. It would be easy for a patron to 'surf' the map, looking for books in a subject. More often reviewed books could show up more prominently (other mapping technologies I've seen draw heavier lines depending on the strength or frequency of the relationship). Another would be even bigger -- the library catalog itself, with subject headings (or, for bookstores like Amazon that have enabled tagging, user tags) as the subjects and items linked from there. This would be, as Wayne notes, a more sophisticated version of the tag cloud we're all all becoming familiar with.

A post on TechCrunch ("FeedXS - RSS for Everyone") pointed me to FeedXS. This is a new service that claims to make it simple for anyone to create an RSS feed. While blog tools are common, this lets you generate a feed without a blog via either a simple web form or MSN Messenger. Although this sort of service can easily be kludged together using a basic web form and tools like the XML::RSS Perl module, it requires some programming skills to do so. FeedXS offers free personal accounts and for-fee business accounts; it's not clear to me where not-for-profits fall into their pricing mix.

While many libraries are jumping right in to the blogosphere, some others may not want to bother with yet another web site to maintain. Or there might be short-term special purpose feeds that don't need the overhead of a full-fledged weblog. Weekly questions for a reading group could be posted this way, or perhaps "fun facts about the library" -- something that interested patrons would like to see and could add to their aggregators.

The January 2006 web version of RefWorks has a new feature for citing weblog entries. Under the site's Search menu is a new tool for RSS feeds. Using this tool, you give it an RSS feed and then select which items in that feed you want to build citations for. It gives you the author, title, permanent URL, full text abstract from the RSS feed, along with fields for other information important for citing something as ephemeral as some blog posts can be (such as date accessed). Citations of weblogs can now be handled by RefWorks just like any other source.

Over at the Alternative Teen Services blog is an informative summary of public libraries using various "library 2.0" tools to attract and communicate with teen audiences. Also listed links to libraries using pod- and vod-casts.

If your library's audience includes this younger set (and even for university libraries whose students are a bit older) -- take note. These technologies are the way your next generation of library users (i.e., people paying, one way or another, for the library) is familiar with communicating.

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.

In an earlier post (Geotagging, posted on 17 June 2005), I talked about an extension to RSS that would allow for encoding of geographic metadata into an RSS feed.

GeoNames RSS to to GeoRSS Converter takes this one logical step further. The GeoNames service takes an RSS feed, searches each entry for recognizable geographical locations, and returns a feed with the appropriate geographical metadata added on. And if you then view the feed through a GeoRSS newsreader (as the GeoNames web site points out, there aren't many of these; they suggest the ACME GeoRSS Reader), you get a map with the locations of the item being discussed in the RSS entries.

This is perfect for news feeds -- get a map of the world with the locations of the each news item shown on screen. As an example, take a look at today's Reuters news. You can see where in the world the news is happening.

On a smaller scale, it might have great application in a library for local news, genealogical research, community events, and so forth. Let people pull up a map of events and pick the ones closest to their houses. Very neat stuff!

Zetoc, the British Library's electronic Table of Contents service, now offers table of contents RSS feeds for a vast number of online journals. Available to Zetoc members only, this new service is described in the May 2006 D-Lib Magazine. For subscribers, the RSS feed links you to the British Library's document delivery service as well as to an institutional OpenURL resolver for locally licensed versions of the articles.

Ah, to be in England....

Catalogablog notes a new product from BlogBridge called BlogBridge: Library. BlogBridge Library is a server-based tool that libraries -- or anyone with a large customer base -- can use to organize a multitude of RSS feeds into a coherent and nicely-presented interface. In their post announcing the new product, BlogBridge says:

BBL is not an aggregator. Rather, it's a tool that says it will make organizing RSS feeds for customer use easier. Individual topics can be assigned to different editors within an organization. Individual feeds and topical collections are available to the end user through RSS and OPML links, respectively.

I'll be curious to get my hands on a copy when the software itself is released. BlogBridge, the parent product, is open-source; there's no indication on the BlogBridge site that I can find about whether BBL will be distributed that way or not.

Pasi Keski-Nisula at the National Library of Health Sciences - Terkko (part of the University of Helsinki) was kind enough to let me know of a new service he has developed. FeedNavigator is a personalizable feed navigator for health sciences information.

In addition to aggregating (and providing search capabilities) for more than 1500 relevant RSS feeds, it also lets you save articles to your own space ("MyFeeds"). Citations for useful items useful to you can be exported to RefWorks. Users of the system who are patrons of several Finnish libraries can access full text through either an SFX (a common OpenURL link resolver) or document delivery service.

The service is free for use by anyone -- though a free user registration is required.

This may be of benefit to, primarily, special librarians, but it's worth a thought for any librarian wishing to make a positive impression on whatever group or person is responsible for funding... David Rothman, in his blog focusing on medical librarianship, notes how easy it is to provide a quality current awareness service to one's organization. A simple search at a news aggregator (that is, an aggregator that actually handles just "official" news sources, not the broader blogosphere) can populate a web page with recent headlines and links to the full-text articles.

Rothman recommends FeedGit, which aggregates these "official" news sources. Enter a search term. You'll see a list of news providers grouped by type (news, web, blogs, images, etc.). For each content type, there are links to an RSS feed specifically on your search term at each of the providers.

Putting this feed on a web page is the next step that Rothman notes -- don't even bother the decision makers with the raw RSS (unless, of course, they've already joined that bandwagon). User your favorite RSS-to-HTML script (mine is Feed2JS), tailor the style to match your own site, and tell the world (or the individual) that it's there. Voilà! A quick-and-dirty clipping service.

ZapTXT (a beta product -- but aren't they all?) is a new service that lets you set up a keyword search of specific RSS feeds and send you an alert -- by email, instant messenger, or text message to a mobile device -- when those keywords appear in that feed. ZapTXT provides a list of popular news feeds (for example, Technology contains about 20 pre-selected feeds, including Engadget, Pogue's Posts, Resource Shelf, and more; Political Blogs contains Wonkette, Daily Kos, and a bunch of others). You can pick multiple sites using the preselected lists. Alternately, you can specify your own favorite feed source. To add multiple personally selected sources, first create the feed, then edit it to add additional RSS sources.

Email alerts go to any email address. IM alerts only go to Jabber, Gtalk and MSN clients -- leaving out AOL's instant messenger. Test messaging is available for all major cell service providers.

With a carefully constructed set of keywords, this is another great clipping service substitute.

Addendum: Sameer Patel of ZapTXT sent me the following helpful tip -- a simple way to search the ENTIRE blogosphere for a keyword. In his words:

"E-Mail is for Old People." That's the title of an article appearing by Dan Carnavale in the October 6 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. (The article is currently available without registration -- as of October 2.)

Carnavale notes that many undergraduate students have moved on to newer, communications media -- instant messaging, text messaging via cell phone, and web 2.0 sites like Facebook and MySpace. He notes that,

Newer, trendier -- or perhaps just plain better -- technologies have the attention of undergraduates and their juniors. Some schools have created a quasi-official presence in MySpace or Facebook and maintain it with much of the information that might have been exclusively posted by email a year or two ago.

RSS is not mentioned in this item; it's a bit different a beast, admittedly. But the article got me thinking: just who is reading all my carefully constructed RSS feeds anyway? If RSS is a significant chunk of your library's public relations and announcement effort, is it effective -- particularly if the generation of people that seem natural users of it happen to see RSS as too unidirectional and "email-like."

When I look at the server statistics on this blog, or on my library's blog, I see lots and lots of hits from aggregators and search engines. And lots for Magpie, which I use with Feed2JS to reprint announcement headlines on my library's home page. While some aggregators are kind enough to tell me that they're acting on behalf of so many subscribers (sadly, that's "so many" is far too often '1' when it's RSS4Lib, and I know that the aggregator is toiling away for me alone, a remnant of my exploring aggregators using my own feed), the hits-per-subscriber ratio assumes I publish more frequently -- a LOT more frequently - -than I do.

Perhaps because it so darned easy to create an RSS feed out of almost any source -- blogs and wikis, of course, but also content management systems, databases, you name it -- and because it is so flexible, RSS is destined to fade into the background, just another piece of the infrastructure of the information age. Yet the promise of being able to skim and dip one's intellectual toes into the information stream makes it more valuable than it seems. Ask not for whom RSS feeds, for it feeds for you...

Here's a neat little trick created by Christopher Harris (author of the Infomancy blog.

Christopher cobbled together a way to delivery MARC records via RSS. As he notes, it violates RSS rules here and there, but it's still an interesting way to send a MARC record from here to there. See his post and a sample MARC-in-RSS feed.