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.

Pageflakes offers a service something like Yahoo! and Google -- mix and match the content you want to see on a single web page. You can keep it private, share them with a group of people you select, or make them public.

Once set up, the page lists the blog or feed title with a number (of unread items) to the right; click the number and see the list of headlines. Click a title, and go to the source. Very slick and AJAXy.

A good starting place for exploring Pageflakes is the public list of Librarian Weblogs maintained by Phlilip Bradley. Pageflakes looks like a good tool for creating ad hoc feedliographies. Pull a bunch of related feeds together, publish them as a public feed, and direct your patrons to them.

Note that Safari users are out in the cold; this site works well with Firefox, though.

Feed2JS is a great tool for reusing RSS feeds on web pages. (See my May 2005 post, It's Not Stealing, It's Syndicating, for an overview.)

However -- there's always a 'however,' isn't there -- there is a fixable problem. If you run your own copy of Feed2JS on your own server (rather than using Feed2JS's public version), unscrupulous folks can borrow your script -- and your bandwidth -- to repurpose other RSS feeds from other sites without your knowledge or permission.

I learned this the hard way when a copy of Feed2JS I manage at my workplace was "borrowed" by someone who was running a fake weblog designed to sell Google ads; the owner of this revenue-driven site was borrowing feeds from other blogs and using my copy of Feed2JS to reproduce them on his site. I was the unwitting intermediary in an unscrupulous, and possibly illegal, reuse of content. (Ironically, I was first made aware of this use of my copy of Feed2JS when another individual else whose commercial site devoted to hair-loss remedies complained to me that my Feed2JS was misappropriating his weblog content on a competitor's blog...)

So how do you tell if your own version of Feed2JS has been borrowed? Look in the feed2js/magpie/cache/ and feed2js/magpie/cache_utf8 directories. There should be one file in the cache directory for each feed you use. The files have inscrutable names like "ad1cb3ddb313d3f10f9b7d50ec8da638." There will be one for each RSS feed your script is monitoring. If you use Feed2JS to monitor three RSS feeds, there will be three files in the cache directory. If there are more files than there should be, your script has likely been borrowed.

Feed2JS.org offers directions for restricting Feed2JS to the feeds you want to be reused. With a bit of extra tinkering with the PHP, you can allow feeds from more than one server to be repurposed through your script.

UPDATE 10 January 2010: Use the technique described here on your own RSS feeds at YourStats, an RSS4Lib tool. Upload your web server's log file and it will provide the number of readers based on the log file.

A thread on Web4Lib about measuring RSS usage through web logs made me realize how tricky this is. Aggregators (and browsers, such as Firefox, Safari, and IE 7) all request RSS feeds from your server, often several times a day. It is hard to tell how much your feed is being used -- the RSS feed for this blog, http://www.rss4lib.com/index.xml, was accessed 19,455 times in October. Which sounds impressive, right?

However, that means that a constellation of individual web browsers, news aggregators, and search engines was checking the feed once a day, once an hour, once a week... Or at some frequency.

I know how many Bloglines subscribers there are (334 as of right now). But I can't keep track of how many are reading this through Yahoo!, Google, NewsGator online, or this, that or the other aggregator.

Looking at the detailed web server log report (which is generated by my host using Analog), I see that some aggregators add the number of users they are collecting data for -- basically, a subscription report. So I can see, in a recent month, the following details:

Bloglines/3.1 (http://www.bloglines.com; 320 subscribers)
NewsGatorOnline/2.0 (http://www.newsgator.com; 7 subscribers)
AttensaOnline/1.0 (http://www.attensa.com; 1 subscribers)
Feedshow/1.0 (http://www.feedshow.com; 1 subscriber)

(This is for several different feeds for several different RSS services -- taken from my entire server report, not just for the main feed for RSS4Lib.)

I also see the hits for all of one kind of web browser -- in this example, Safari, get lumped together as one browser type, "AppleSyndication/54". Different versions of Safari have different browser types, so I also see "AppleSyndication/53", for example.

In short, it's very hard to gauge readership -- to separate reads from aggregator or browser "are you updated" hits. This is doubly true since so many people, myself included, read the full text of a post within the aggregator and rarely click through to the site where "spider" hits and "user" hits can be separated, mostly, by a good web log analyzer application.

P.S. I find this amazing, but this is the 100th post on my blog.... Happy "centennial" to me!

Update -- 21 Feb 2007 Google Reader's crawler, Feedfetcher-Google, now includes a subscriber count when it grabs your RSS feed. In my log file, a sample line looks like Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 133 subscribers; feed-id=1495776793707971617). Thanks to Taming the Beast for this tip.

Jill Stover of Library Marketing - Thinking Outside the Book (a great source of library marketing ideas, by the way), wrote about a handy feature added to the Engineering Village 2 database. Once you're in the database and viewing the abstract of an article, there's a link to "blog this". That link, when clicked, gives you a snippet of code to put into your weblog.

The code EV2 provides gives the title of the article and a graphic for EV2. Clicking on either will bring you through your library's proxy server to the full text. (This example will work if you have access to Tufts University's proxy server, but not for anyone else...):

Corrosion and fatigue characteristics of positively polarised Zeron 100 base and weld metal in synthetic seawater

Jill notes how useful this functionality is for librarians who want to highlight tools available to their patrons. I take this one step further: why not have a link to "blog this" appear on any relevant portion of the library site? From a change in hours to a new exhibit in the library lobby to other news, events, or information of note -- make it easy for your patrons to link to the source of the information when they are blogging.

The discussion in the comments section of my most recent post prompted me to do a bit of coding. It struck me that libraries needed a tool to help encourage their patrons to blog about the library. And not just to encourage talk -- to actively invite comment on particular web pages (describing events, book talks, policy changes, etc.) Weblogs may well be the most powerful world of mouth tool in a library's Internet arsenal.

The result is a simple tool I've called Word of Mouth Blog LINK -- WOMBLINK for short.

The concept is straightforward. A WOMBLINK is a link provided by a library web site directly back to a specific web page. It is designed to be included in weblogs and is meant to be drop-dead easy for the librarian and patron to use, requiring nothing more than copying and pasting for the site publisher or the blogger.

So what is it? A WOMBLINK is two lines of HTML that, when included on a web page, display the words "Blog This". A prospective blogger can click on this link and receive a second short snippet of HTML that includes a link directly to the original web page as well as a small logo provided by the site owner.

So what does it look like? Well, if I wanted to make it easy for people to blog about this article on RSS4Lib, I would go to WOMBLINK and fill in a form. This would generate the following HTML:

<a href = 'http://www.rss4lib.com/womblink/display.pl?id=103'>Blog This</a><br>
WOMBLINK provided by <a href = 'http://www.rss4lib.com/womblink/'>RSS4Lib</a>

That code looks like this in the browser:

Blog This
WOMBLINK provided by RSS4Lib

Then, as a blogger wanting to comment on and link directly to this web page, I would click the "Blog This" WOMBLINK above and get the following bit of HTML code:

<a href = 'http://www.rss4lib.com/'><img src =
'http://www.rss4lib.com/images/RSS4Lib-Logo.jpg' height = '20'
border = '0' alt = 'Link to RSS4Lib'><a> <a href =
'http://www.rss4lib.com/'>RSS4Lib</a><br><font
size = '1'>This link courtesy <a href =
'http://www.rss4lib.com/womblink/'>RSS4Lib WOMBLINK</a></font>

Once copied and pasted into a blog, it looks like this -- complete with a logo for the web site being blogged:

RSS4Lib
This link courtesy RSS4Lib WOMBLINK

While some blogging software packages offer a JavaScript bookmarklet to "blog this," bookmarklets aren't always that useful. The blogger may not be technically savvy enough to install it or may not be working at her own computer when she sees your web site. It makes more sense to use a software-independent tool that all bloggers can take advantage of. An added plus of WOMBLINK is that the source web site can provide its own graphic (as long as it works well 25 pixels tall!) to help reinforce that web site's identity.

Let me know what you think of this tool -- send your comments and feedback to me at womblink@rss4lib.com.

I've been playing around a bit over the past week with an application called FeedZcollector, written by brothers Xander and Fred Zelders. FeedZcollector is a Windows application that monitors RSS feeds, adding new items to either a Microsoft Access or MySQL database. FeedZcollector is the retrieval engine behind Feeds4all.com.

I've been using the trial version to pull feeds into Access (this free version limits you to 10 feeds; you can purchase versions of the tool that let you work with 25, 100, 1000, or an unlimited number of feeds).

The tool simply pulls down the latest items from the feeds you enter and stores them (title, abstract, URL, time loaded, etc.) in an Access (or MySQL) database. What you do with them from that point forward is up to you. The Zelders purposefully designed the tool to be a component of something larger -- but a component that could be used together with other applications.

In my testing, FeedZcollector did its job well, pulling feeds into Access soon after the source site updated the feed. Being able to construct fielded searches, or to augment entries with other data generated by my hypothetical site's users (tags, times viewed, etc. -- anything that could be recorded in a data structure) makes it a powerful back-end tool for repurposing content.

As a die-hard Mac/Unix guy, I wish there were a version of the software that would run in a Unix/Linux environment. However, according to Fred Zelders,

FeedZcollector is a useful foundation for building your own aggregator without having to rely on external, Internet-based, services such as RSSMix or Sphere that provide aggregation services with or without keyword filtering.

Page2RSS is a tool that lets you know, via RSS, when a specific web page has been updated. Give it a web page URL and it will give you an RSS feed to put in your browser or aggregator. Whenever the web page is updated, you'll know.

In addition to being a good way to track changes in infrequently-updated web pages, this is also a low-overhead tool for allowing your patrons to keep up with new stuff on your library's web site. Even if you don't have time or interest in setting up an RSS feed for your library news page, by providing a link on that page to the Page2RSS updates feed, you can allow your patrons to monitor your site.

I can't find any documentation on the Page2RSS site to indicated how frequently the application checks your web page; this is probably not the tool to use when you absolutely must know if a page changes instant it happens, but for most normal purposes, it's a useful utility.

Update 6 Feb 2007: As Konstantin from Page2RSS notes in a comment (below), Page2RSS checks sites every 2-4 hours.

Thanks to contributions from RSS4Lib readers and a bit of online searching, I've put together the start of a directory of legislatures (national bodies and, for the United States, state legislatures) that offer RSS feeds to track current legislation in one way or another. See Legislation Feeds for the list to date.

If you know of other legislative bodies that offer their constituents an RSS tool for tracking legislation, please send them to legislationfeeds@rss4lib.com.

Google announced a new API this week, the Google AJAX Feed API. In a nutshell, it allows you to use Google's cache of RSS feeds (the same cache that makes Google Reader work) for whatever purpose you want: recent posts from your favorite blog (à la Feed2JS), mashups, or anything else.

Results are returned in JSON, XML (the original feed source), or both. It supports all flavors of RSS and Atom.

I've just started playing with this -- but here's a completely unstyled list of headlines from CNN pulled down and displayed using this API: RSS4Lib Google API Test.

See the next post for an update to this item. (30 April 2007).

EBSCOhost has added RSS feeds for any search you execute within its databases. Once you've activated this new feature on the "New Features" page, linked from the upper right corner of EBSCOhost pages (it's called "One Step Alerts" -- the press release omits the name), any search you run in the database can be turned in to an RSS feed for updates. Simply click the "Create alert for this search" link and receive a link for the corresponding RSS feed.

Items in the feed are article titles and brief citations. The "Read More" link takes you to a full citation page with an OpenURL link for your library (assuming your library has one set up). If you're logged in, you can receive the alerts by email as well as RSS; no login is required for the RSS feed, though. Your feeds last indefinitely as long as you access the feeds within one week of creation and no more than two months goes by without new data in the feed.

My only quibble is with the two-month inactivity limit on the feed itself. Search alerts should be a "fire and forget" service -- they run until cancelled. Perhaps a better expiration date would be based on another kind of inactivity -- for example, the feed is not accessed (by an aggregator or feed reader) or the user does not click through to the full citation for the full citation in some extended period of time. After all, search alerts do not necessarily serve a short-term role -- for me, they are very useful tools when I want to stay on top of a topic over the long-term. I'm more likely to create a search alert on a topic where "new stuff" is irregular or unpredictable than when information comes so quickly that I remember to look myself.

Overall, though, this is an excellent service and a model for other vendors to emulate.

I received an email today from Kathleen McEvoy at EBSCO Publishing in response to my post on Friday about EBSCOhost's new RSS features. She explained that the way I thought the RSS feed should work -- a view echoed by David Rothman -- is, in fact, the way the site works, contrary to the instructions that were posted there. EBSCO updated the instructions to say more clearly:

As long as the aggregator pulls down the feed regularly, the service stays alive, as it should.

How many people read RSS4Lib? I've asked this question before, but I keep coming back to it. Each time I do, I realize that the answer is even less straightforward than I previously thought.

Looking at my server log files, I think it's clear that the vast majority of hits come from the RSS and ATOM feeds -- they account for a whopping 43,255 requests, or 68.9% of files delivered from www.rss4lib.com, for April 2007. This number -- as impressive as it sounds to me -- does not really mean much. Feed readers and aggregators, by their very nature, check the feed frequently (many times a day) to see if the feed has been updated so that the application can tell the user there's something new to read. A well-behaved feed reader or aggregator will only download the feed again if it has changed. But it is still pinging the server regularly to see if anything has changed before it downloads the full feed. A very large portion -- well over 50% -- of these requests result in nothing being downloaded from the server.

Where Are Feeds Read?

So how can one tell how many people are actually subscribed to an RSS feed? There are at least four significant sources of subscribers to an RSS feed:

1) Web-based aggregators like Bloglines and Google Reader can download the same feed many times a day to make sure nothing is new and then reproduce it for multiple subscribers.

2) PC-based feed aggregators (for example, Feed Demon or Radio UserLand). Like Web-based aggregators, these applications also check the feed periodically, but do so for each user individually. Ten users running these applications would result in ten downloads of an RSS feed per time period (every hour, every day, twice a day -- depending on how the user has configured his own application).

3) Browser-based "live bookmarks" (for example, Firefox, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari). Newer web browsers allow a user to bookmark an RSS feed and display, variously, headlines or the full RSS feed as items are updated. Like other aggregators, they check the RSS file periodically for updates.

4) Web applications (such as Feed2JS or RSS2HTML) that plug RSS feeds into web pages that are, in turn, read by one or more people.

Methodology

So as I looked through my server log files, I began to get increasingly curious about what, if anything, I could tease out of the data that are there. There are, of course, commercial products, like FeedBurner or GetClicky, that provide nice reports, if you have them provide your feeds. I've opted to do things myself, though. So I got adventurous and started writing some Perl code to parse the log files and make a best-guess effort to estimate the number of subscribers to RSS4Lib's feeds.

Subscribers will be off for several reasons, the most significant one being that a single person might be subscribed to the same feed in several places. I'm not overstating my self-importance; how many of us ever delete our subscriptions at one service when we move to a new one? Not I. When I try a new aggregator, I'm likely to download my entire subscription from my current favorite aggregator as an OPML file and upload it into the new aggregator. Whichever ends up being my current favorite I use; the has-been just sits there, but I'm still subscribed to things. And unless I've made a live bookmark in Firefox in my toolbar, I may not notice that a feed I subscribed to has been merrily updating itself for weeks.

On the other hand, in many cases it's very difficult to determine if a given user-agent is a web browser or PC-based aggregator (with, presumably, one subscriber) or an aggregator or web application with many subscribers. Most user-agents -- how a web browser or application identifies itself to the web server -- simply give their name, their platform (Mac, Windows, etc.), and what kind of browser they're most like (Mozilla, Gecko, etc.). A very few -- and fortunately for my purposes, the most popular aggregators are included in this elite few -- actually include the number of readers subscribed to the feed in the user-agent statement (for example, Bloglines tells the server that it's "Bloglines/3.1 (http://www.bloglines.com; 602 subscribers)". It gives a name, a URL for more information, and the number of subscribers. Other user-agents are less informative; an example of this type is "FeedOnFeeds/0.1.9 (+http://minutillo.com/steve/feedonfeeds/)". And still others are downright terse: "Particls/1.0".

How to count these various types? It depends. The good guys (Bloglines, Google, Yahoo, and a few others) make life easy; it's simply a matter of looking at the log file and pulling out the number of subscribers. There's not much to be done with the "bad" web aggregators, the ones that do not provide any user subscriber data, except to count them as one aggregator, one user.

For PC- and browser-based readers, it's possible to make some good guesses. The log file includes the IP address of the computer requesting the RSS file. By combining the user-agent and the IP address and counting the unique pairs, it's possible to come up with a good guess at the number of unique users who are receiving the RSS file through this channel. Since each user-agent/IP address pair likely downloads the file multiple times in a day, the number of user-agent/IP address pairs stands as a proxy for subscribers.

And then there are web-based applications like Feed2JS that simply convert an RSS feed into HTML and place it on a web page. The user-agent does not know how many people read the web page and does not provide the URL of the page where the feed will appear. (I don't think this latter point is even feasible; thanks to caching of RSS feeds on the web server where the content is being reused, it's impossible to know at the time the feed is downloaded from here where it will end up.) This sort of activity gets boiled down to the number of unique user-agent/IP address pairs, which is almost certainly lower than the number of people who see the web page the feed is on.

Results

When all of these things are processed and added together, I discovered that there might have been 1096 subscribers on April 30, 2007. "Might have been?" Yes -- this number is a guess and is almost certainly not the real number of subscribers, let alone the real number of readers. Readers could be lower (people who subscribe in more than one place but read in one; readers who simply have not bothered to delete the subscription in a no-longer-favored aggregator) or higher (people who read the feed through web pages or through syndicators that use aggregators as the source of their information and then redistribute it elsewhere -- via tools such as ZapTXT and Feed2JS). But this number will have to do for now.

One thing is clear to me from this exploration of my server's log files: RSS allows my content to go places I never thought possible and to be read by an audience far broader than I would have guessed reasonable. That's something to keep in mind when you're writing for your library's site -- or for yourself.

Please feel free to experiment with the application I wrote -- it's at http://www.rss4lib.com/feedstats/ -- and let me know what you think.

Here's a very clever use of the Macintosh's RSS screen saver and the library's new book list: a new books RSS screen saver. If you have a Mac, follow this link: screen saver (there are instructions on the blog for customizing it). Windows users are out of luck, I'm afraid.

What a great idea -- computers in the library could advertise the new materials. With a bit of effort, computers in the children's area could show new children's books, new mysteries in that section, and new biographies on the PC near that section. And, of course, patrons could use it at home, too.

MyFeedz is an interesting tool from Adobe Lab's -- from Adobe's Romanian office, to be precise -- that aspires to build a personalized news service based on your RSS reading habits.

MyFeedz has two ways to learn about your interests. One is by simply watching you read the titles and first paragraphs of text and noting when you click through to read the full text. The other involves jump-starting the system (at your choice) by uploading your RSS reading list via an OPML file (OPML files can be output from most popular RSS aggregators, including Bloglines and Google Reader). The process behind the scenes is not quick -- I suggest getting a cup of coffee, walking the dog, or reading your day's RSS feeds while MyFeedz works.

When MyFeedz is done doing its magic -- described somewhat cryptically on the site as a process involving an analysis of "its source, tags, popularity, rating, language and more" -- it has built a profile of the subjects that you generally prefer to read. It then goes out and looks for more blog entries that match this general profile.

Here is where I'll speculate a bit on what is going on behind the scenes. My guess is that MyFeedz is using some form of vector analysis to model the items in which you have shown an interest. Vector analysis (see this Wikipedia article for more of the math than I understand) compares texts and scores them with a probability that they are about the same thing, even if the same exact phrases do not appear in both documents.

If I am correct, that is the time-consuming part. For my aggregated list, MyFeedz took several hours to be ready to show me new articles based on the profile it generated for me. But now, it is showing me articles within the sphere of what I've already expressed interest in knowing about. As I write this, three of its top five recommendations for me are:

• The Four Habits of Highly Effective Librarians
  This one I'd seen already
• Seeking Windows Consultant with COM ATL, .NET Win CE for 6+ months
  A bit off-topic, but I read a lot of computer-related stuff
• Why Buying Feedburner is Really Smart of Google
  They are? This was news to me! See TechCrunch

The other two are less clearly germane (one about the Dodgers and I'm a member of Red Sox Nation, the other about NJ Governor Corzine's political difficulties). I think batting .600 is pretty good for an automated recommendation engine that I just recently started using. However, as I've written before (see "Serendipity at Risk"), I like a bit of surprise in my reading, as long as it is tangentially related to what I'm focusing on. The items I catch out of the corner of my eye while I'm looking in one direction are often fascinating.

I will be curious to see if, as I work with MyFeedz, if it continues to narrow in on my core interests while providing me some "ah-ha!" moments. MyFeedz will not replace my aggregator -- that is not its purpose -- but it makes for an interesting discovery tool.

The RSS Specifications blog has an article listing 15 uses for RSS in an educational environment. While many of these items fit within a broader academic context, several could be easily ported to the library. For example, a library could use RSS to publish a study guide. It might be general (i.e., one word aimed at a certain reading level each day) or specific to a user group (daily historical facts for a specific K-12 or higher ed course).

How is your library using RSS to communicate with your community?

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.

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.

I read in this week's FreePint Newsletter about a grant-funded project called "ticTOCs. This a tool to bring journal tables of contents (the TOCs) from multiple publishers to patrons through an interface as simple as ticking off a series of boxes. From ticTOCs in a Nutshell:

While this project is still in development, it shows promise for standardizing the interface and content available from publishers (some of whom, we know, provide titles and links while others add abstracts, tagging, or other information to their table of contents feeds). ticTOCs will be a layer on top of RSS making it simpler for information-seekers to get the tables of contents they want, in a consistent and reliable format.

Bloglines latest innovation will blur the line between reading a news item in its "native" form and reading it via RSS even further. In an announcement Tuesday (18 September), Bloglines released limited support for Cascading Style Sheets within blog posts that it displays.

In other words, if I'm doing this right, if you are reading this at Bloglines (or at RSS4Lib.com), this paragraph will have a bright blue background. That's because I added the inline style "style='background-color: #00A0E1'" to the <span> tag that starts this paragraph.

Bloglines has restricted the range of CSS values it allows -- to prevent clever (or malicious) RSS creators from wreaking havoc with the interface. A (lengthy) list of allowed styles is on the Bloglines site.

While offering its users a richer reading experience, Bloglines is also making the distinction between the blog page and the RSS feed even smaller.

New to me, perhaps not new to you: Peterson's College and University Feed Directory. Broken down by kind (several examples: Libraries-General, Research Centers, and Schools and Programs) and searchable, it includes hundreds of feeds from academic institutions. Topics are available as OPML feeds.

It is not as comprehensive as I would like (for example, my library's new books feeds and news feeds are not included), but this site does provide a decent overview of what is available in terms of academic feeds. There is an "Add URL function, to which I've submitted the aforementioned feeds.

Like many standards, the RSS 2.0 Specification provides detailed instructions for what elements must or may be in an RSS feed and, in broad terms, how to format them. However, the specification does not -- nor should it -- provide detailed guidance on what to put in the various elements.

That's where the Really Simple Syndication Best Practices Profile comes in. Published by the RSS Advisory Board, the group that has responsibility for maintaining the RSS Specification, the RSS Best Practices Profile offers guidelines on how to format an RSS document for the widest possible audience of aggregators, feed readers, and other tools. The Board tested feeds against a range of aggregators: Bloglines, BottomFeeder 4.4, FeedDemon 2.5 (2.5.0.10), Google Reader, Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox 2.0 (2.0.9), My Yahoo, NewsGator Online and Opera 9 (9.22).

This document is aimed at developers more than at bloggers -- the blog tools we all use already create RSS feeds -- but when we build systems that generate RSS for our users, doing so in the format that has the best chance of providing users with the same experience, regardless of where they consume the feed, is a good idea. For each required or optional element in the RSS specification, this document says what the specification requires and how best to implement that requirement in practice. Some selected recommendations from the guide:

1. Author: The Board suggests that, for individually authored blogs (where everything is written by the same person), the item's author element be omitted in favor of the channel's managingEditor or webMaster element.
2. Category: The Board recommends that the category element provide the full hierarchy of the category term, not just the term itself. In other words, a category of "dogs" would be better as (and I'm making this up) "animals/canines/dogs".
3. Description: The Board makes the common-sense suggestion that, when there are links in an item's description element to other pages on the same site as the blog that the links be fully qualified URLs (for example, http://www.rss4lib.com/index.html), not relative URLs (/index.html).

By taking some simple steps to generate RSS feeds so they will be read and understood by the most common feed readers and aggregators, you can broaden the audience for your content and help ensure that your readers have a uniform experience regardless of where they consume your RSS content.

How to best encode characters with diacritics in your RSS feed? That was the question posed in a thread on Web4Lib recently, started by a librarian working putting his new books list into an RSS feed. (A great idea in itself, of course.) Since many books, especially in an academic library, but also in other libraries with user communities speaking diverse languages, this is important -- you want to be able to show the title properly, especially to speakers of the language for whom you've bought the book.

There are, of course, several ways to encode many diacritic marks (HTML character entities and Unicode, for example); finding the best one for RSS engendered some discussion.

The consensus in the discussion was that using character references is the best solution, particularly for the item title, which is arguably the most important part of an RSS item to get right (OK, the URL is also critical). If users cannot understand the title, why would they click to the full text?

Character references take the form

Ӓ

Paul Pival learned something interesting about EBSCO, EZProxy, and RSS feeds: if you don't edit your EZProxy configuration just so, RSS alerts for saved searches in EBSCO databases get rewritten to pass through your library's proxy server. And if that happens, off-campus users (including aggregators like Bloglines or Google Reader) can't get to the RSS feed. (The link to each new item from the database in the feed is still routed through your proxy server so your patrons can still get to the full text at a single click.)

See the Distant Librarian for instructions. In short, all that's needed is adding a single line to Useful Utilites' standard EBSCO EZProxy configuration:

NeverProxy rss.ebscohost.com

I suppose other databases require similar proxy configuration changes. If you have examples, leave them in the comments.

What if your library provides so many RSS feeds your patrons can't keep track of them? The University of Alabama in Huntsville built a nice tool in response to this situation: The UAH Library Feed Aggregator. It pulls together the RSS feeds from the library's Flickr feed, two library blogs, a Huntsville events feed, the New York Times, and the Huntsville weather forecast.

The site has a very clear layout, making it easy to see what's recent and what's old. The library's aggregator provides a single place for its patrons to see all the news important to its patrons.

Ellyssa Kroski, in her iLibrarian blog, notes a list of " 25 Awesome Beta Research Tools from Libraries Around the World." The list includes some things I've heard of, such as MIT's VERA and the University of Virginia's Blacklight, and some others that are new to me.

The February 2008 issue of Wired magazine offers an interactive graphical depiction of what happens to your blog post once you click the publish button. "The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits — to You" shows all the interactions between the blogger, the aggregator, spam blogs, and (the whole point, right?) the reader. The Flash graphic depicts all these interactions and makes somewhat clearer how your post gets to wherever it's ultimately consumed.

OCLC announced today that "Public WorldCat lists are available as RSS feeds that can be monitored using any RSS-capable service or software." When you view a user's list within WorldCat.org, you will be able to subscribe to an RSS feed for that list -- so whenever that user adds an item to it, you'll find out.

Libraries that use WorldCat.org lists to generate reading lists on various topics can now embed those lists easily and automatically on library web pages -- and let their patrons know, at the same time, that there are new items of interest.

So, for example, I've created a brief list of books about RSS. You can subscribe to its feed at http://worldcat.org/profiles/varnumk/lists/53691/rss. Whenever I add a new item to the list, you'll know. If you go to my list in WorldCat (it's called "RSS4Lib RSS List"), the RSS link OCLC provides redirects you to AddThis.com, a site that provides one-click subscription or one-click bookmarking links to a wide range of RSS aggregators and social bookmarking services.

According to a recent press release,

The catch -- there's always a catch -- is that you need Tivo Desktop Plus on your Windows PC (sorry, Mac users) to get the material from your PC to your TiVo. So I won't be testing it any time soon. This marks another move forward in getting Internet podcast content onto the family room TV, though it's not as easy as it could be.

How do you read your RSS feeds? Chances are, you use either Bloglines or Google Reader, the two market leaders. A recent report, 'Google Reader Slowly Closing on Bloglines' by Heather Hopkins of Hitwise shows how the gap is closing:

Hitwise doesn't show market share of blog readers directly, but market share of total internet usage; according to this calculation, Bloglines has a 40% lead on Google reader's market share of internet visits.

These stats are more or less mirrored on RSS4Lib. Looking at my user stats for May 21, 2008, this blog had a total of 1851 feed subscribers, of whom 831 were from Bloglines and 568 were from Google Reader. (See my Counting RSS Subscribers post from a year ago where I discuss my methodology.) This translates into Bloglines having a 44.9% share of my feed subscribers to Google's 30.1% share, or 49% more than Google. Netvibes is 3rd for aggregators among RSS4lib subscribers (with an almost 13% share of RSS4Lib feed subscribers), while Rojo (3rd overall, according to Hitwise) is a far distant contender for RSS4Lib readers with 8 subscribers.

I'm a diehard Bloglines user myself but I see myself slipping into the minority. What tool do you use, and why?

Figuring out how much bang you're getting for your blogging effort is not as simple as it first seems. While it's relatively straightforward to calculate readership of static Web pages on your server, making a similar estimate of syndicated content readership is much trickier. (For an exploration of that topic, see my 2007 blog post, "Counting RSS Subscribers," and the feedstats application I built to estimate out how many people might be reading RSS4Lib.)

The trick, of course, is when you "free" your content via syndication formats, it becomes harder to tell at a glance how much those syndicated files are being read. This is a problem for libraries, as for any other business operation, because library managers need information about the effect of their publicity and public relations efforts to justify them.

With the goal of creating a tool to help bloggers, library bloggers in particular, quantify their feed readership, I created a version of my older RSS4Lib-specific tool for general use: YourStats.

YourStats parses a log file and generates an estimate of total "direct" readership (that is, readership of the feed itself). It summarizes readership reported by aggregators like Bloglines and counts unique IP addresses for PC-based readers (such as Firefox or NetNewsWire). Of course, individual blog posts often far afield, being reproduced in other systems that do not report readership numbers. Other tools, such as Magpie (the RSS feed cacher) or Yahoo! Pipes, almost certainly redistribute your content to many other readers but do so in completely opaque ways. This sort of readership is not included in YourStats.

A couple notes:

• If you use Movable Type or WordPress to power your blog, and your RSS and Atom feeds have the default names, the application will take your log file and process it, giving results for both RSS (index.xml or feed=rss2) and Atom (atom.xml and feed=atom) readership.
• You can specify a different feed by entering its directory path and filename (for example, if your blog's RSS feed is at http://your.blog.com/stuff/feed.xml, you would enter /stuff/feed.xml.
• YourStats only handles Apache standard log files.

I hope YourStats will provide you with quantifiable numbers around your blog's readership. Try it and let me know what you think.

Paul Pival at The Distant Librarian noted a tool from Google that I had not been aware of: the Dynamic Feed Control Wizard, a JavaScript that you can embed in your web site to pull in RSS headlines and summaries from your favorite sites.

Give it a keyword and it will find matching feeds; pick one, and it gives you the JavaScript to display that code in a vertical or horizontal box on your site. I'm showing a screen shot of the set-up interface here:

This is a very handy tool for grabbing a single feed and placing it on a web page; it could be very useful for libraries that do not have an abundance of technical expertise but have a blog they want to include elsewhere on the site.

One part of Google's interface confused me (odd, as Google is usually so clever at interfaces). When entering a "Feed Expression", Google will not take an RSS feed's URL. It expects you to type keywords describing your feed, and it will figure out the actual feed URL. So entering my feed's URL (http://www.rss4lib.com/index.xml) did nothing; entering simply "RSS4Lib" produced the feed.

Sample

Visit the full text of this entry to see what the code looks like embedded in a web page: Google Has an RSS Embedding Tool.

Feedbooks is a site that turns an RSS feed -- your own or your favorite daily read -- into a PDF file for offline reading. A sample of Feedbooks' PDF options for RSS4Lib's feed can be found here: . It includes PDF files formatted for A4 paper, the Cybook & Sony Reader, iLiad, and "Custom PDF," which is in this case standard-sized U.S. paper.

The tool works quickly, generating a PDF on the fly. First, set up an account at Feedbooks. Then, create a "News" item and enter the RSS feed you wish to subscribe to. The system defaults to A4 paper size; there is not a default 8.5" x 11" size. (You can set the Custom PDF page size to this selecting the "custom settings" link and entering the page size in millimeters: 216 by 279 millimeters.) The resulting PDF file can then be downloaded; a link is provided for bookmarking.

Other customizations are font (from a handful of common fonts), font size, and line height. The font choice only applies to the item content, not to the item title. Feeds are displayed one per page, which leaves a lot of white space (a solution I prefer to that used by FeedJournal, which I reviewed in December 2007). The PDF download has a table of contents with page numbers, though the page numbers themselves are not displayed on subsequent pages. I also noticed that some posts in the Feedbooks PDF version lost their paragraphs and were presented as one long block of text. The site seems to reproduce all the items in the RSS feed; the RSS4Lib RSS feed has 15 items, all of which are in the Feedbooks feed.

Do you ever subscribe to RSS feeds that have huge amounts of information, just to get the occasional post that mentions a particular topic or two? Yeah, me too. FeedSifter is just the tool for us. Enter an RSS feed URL and one or more words or phrases, and it will build you a version of the RSS feed that contains only entries matching one or more of your requested words. It allows for basic Boolean searching. Words or phrases entered on one line are joined by "AND"; words or phrases on separate lines are joined by "OR."

A few examples:

• New York Times sports news about the Red Sox


• CNN Top Stories that contain either 'McCain' and 'Obama' (both words) or contain the word 'elections'


• RSS4Lib posts that mention FeedSifter (nicely recursive, huh?)

The resulting page is, itself, an RSS feed that you can subscribe to in your aggregator or save as a live bookmark in your browser. Or incorporate the sifted feed into a web page using Google's RSS embedding tool. I can see an obvious use for this tool at the library reference desk. This makes an easy way to set up a quick-and-dirty current awareness feed for patrons, based on news services or journal table of contents, that can tell them when something new has been published in a narrow area.

It was just a matter of time, but Bloglines has added advertisements to their site. When I went to read my feeds this morning, there was an ad for T-Mobile right on the starting page:

I've long wondered just where Bloglines was getting revenue to support itself -- it didn't make sense to me that IAC Search & Media, its owner, was keeping Bloglines running to make my blogreading life easier. So far, I haven't noticed advertisements on individual post or folder pages. Could those be far behind?

Interestingly, the advertisement I was shown was managed by.... DoubleClick. Which Google acquired in March 2008. Now, it seems, whether you use Google Reader or Bloglines, you're putting advertising dollars into the Big G's pocket.

In the category of being so obvious it's a wonder it took this long for someone to do it (with a subcategory of "D'oh! I wish I'd done it first") is Mloovi. Mloovi takes a web page or an RSS feed, runs it through Google's translation tool, and gives you a permalink for the translated output. Mloovi also gets my vote for best Web 2.0 site subtitle: "beta (if it ain't beta it ain't web 2.0)". I think I'll adopt that as my personal motto.

So, if you've been dying to read RSS4Lib in French, Russian, Arabic, or Hindi, here's your opportunity. (Mloovi offers translations between any pair of these languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese (both Simplified and Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

This tool will be very handy for me to keep up with the biblioblogging world that doesn't happen to write in a language that I can read. I can also see it useful as a way to get publishers' notifications, etc., where they are offered via RSS but inconveniently not in the language that the bibliographer speaks. Having permanent URLs for the translation, whether for a web page or a feed, is exceptionally handy. The feeds, I should note, have advertisements added as new items, noted with "ADVERT" as a prefix.

Mloovi also offers an iframe widget code; however, it only allows a single translation, not a choice for your users -- unless you want to clutter up your interface with lots of buttons. Here, as an example, is the English-to-German translation of RSS4Lib's feed:

Oh, and a note about the name: "mloovi" (actually, "mlooví," with a long "í" -- something impossible to render in a domain name) is the Czech 3rd person singular -- he, she, or it speaks.

Addendum (12 August 08): Mike from mloovi.com pointed out in the comments that multiple languages can be selected in the widget -- for example:

I've just started playing with Google Chrome, Google's new browser. Its strengths are impressive, but I was disappointed to see no support, as yet, for reading RSS feeds. They display as text, with all tags stripped out, and no semblance of readability. As an example, here's RSS4Lib's RSS 2.0 feed:

Given that Google already has a way to display RSS feeds on a web page, it seems odd to me that it didn't make its way into the first public beta of Chrome. Even the iPhone version of Safari (which similarly does not include a built-in RSS reader) redirects RSS feeds to a web page, hosted by Apple, that renders the feed as an HTML page. For an example that only works from an iPhone (or if you can set your browser's user-agent string to "iPhone") see Apple's rendering of the RSS4Lib feed.

I'm hopeful that a forthcoming release of Chrome will include some capability to read display RSS feeds within the browser.

Update, 16 December 2008. Google Chrome came out of beta on December 11, 2008, without RSS support. See Google Chrome: Out of Beta, Still No RSS.

RSS Mixer, a recently released as an "alpha", lets you create an account, input one or more RSS feeds, and gives you a combined output. Once you've set up an account (using OpenID or a one-off account at the site), entering feeds to mix is straightforward. The user interface is available in eight languages (there's a language link in the site's footer). Choices include German, English, Spanish, French, Russian, and Chinese.

Mixed feeds can be tagged and shared -- there are built-in widgets for mobile versions, creating web widgets, emailing a mixed feed to a friend, and exporting a mix as an OPML file, in addition to the version viewable on the RSS Mixer site -- for example, an ego search for RSS4Lib.

One thing I noticed is that sorting in mixes is odd. In the above two-feed mix (comprised of RSS4Lib's RSS feed and a Technorati search feed for "rss4lib"), an RSS4Lib entry is sometimes followed by one or more posts discovered by Technorati about that particular entry. Other times, the Technorati post comes first. In all cases, though, the RSS4Lib entry was posted before anyone could comment on it -- sorting should be consistent, whatever the algorithm is.

By further mashing up RSS Mixer's output, it is possible to create a keyword search across multiple specific feeds. FeedSifter (reviewed here in July 2008) lets you searching a feed for one or more keywords. As a test of this, I used RSS Mixer to create a combined feed out of about 55 RSS- and library-related feeds. I then used FeedSifter to limit that to anything in that mixed feed that mentions metadata.

It would not surprise me if searching were on the drawing board for a future version of RSS Mixer, but there's no indication of this functionality now.

Reading RSS on Amazon's Kindle reader through the web browser can be slow and inefficient. There's a new tool, kindlefeeder.com that automates the process by sending you, by email, the RSS feeds you wish to read.

Once you've created an account at kindlefeeder.com and entered your Kindle user name, you then enter the RSS feeds that you wish to have mailed to you. The feeds are then gathered, converted into a Kindle-friendly format, and sent to your Kindle email account on your handheld device.

The author of this tool, Daniel Choi, also built an open-source tool called kindle-feeds that allows anyone to set up a similar feed service for their own Kindle.

DoYouFeed, a site that takes an RSS feed and formats it for pretty viewing on an iPhone or iPod touch. Once you give it an RSS feed to process, it returns an iPhone- iPod touch-friendly web page with the headlines and brief descriptions from the feed. Clicking on an article link pulls up the full text of the item but without the blog's trappings -- very handy if you're using your gadget on a slow data network (as opposed to wireless).

While the reader itself works as advertised, I have two criticisms. The first is that the iPhone's version of Safari already knows how to read RSS feeds -- it does so by routing them through a service that Apple provides.

The second, and more serious one, is that DoYouFeed puts advertisements at the bottom of the full text article, thereby making money from the blogger's words without returning any of it to the author. In the case of the DoYouFeed version of RSS4Lib's feed, this is in direct violation of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 license I placed in the RSS feed. This license only allows, as it says, non-commercial use of the feed. DoYouFeed should parse the RSS feed and either not display non-commercial-use only feeds or not display advertisements on them.

Update (4:00 PM 11/20/08) -- fixed URL to DoYoueed; left off a pesky "www."