Perhaps I’ve been asleep at the switch, but I just noticed an interesting use of two of my favorite social software tools over at The Washington Post. They include a Technorati and del.icio.us gadgets alongside articles.
So, for example, if you’re blogging about the Post’s article on Shani Davis’ decision to withdraw from the 10,000-meter race at the Olympics, there’s a Technorati “who blogged this” box in which your blog will appear. And if you want to save and tag the article into del.icio.us, there’s a link built in to the article for just that.
It’s refreshing to see a newspaper — like most publishers, primarily concerned with bringing eyeballs to its pages — trying new technologies that might actually increase the linkability of their articles. By making it simple to add their content to at least several major social software tools, the Post’s editors are making it easier for people to find the relevant news on their web site.
I’m not sure what the connection is to libraries, exactly, but thought I’d share anyway.
Update: Now that Technorati has worked its magic, I realize that the real draw for adding a “who blogs this” sidebar: it’s a great ego feeder for bloggers! There my humble little blog is, listed in the sidebar of a Washington Post article. Guess which newspaper I’m going to be trolling for ideas?
Amazon’s Plogs
More than just another cute neologism, Amazon’s newly released plogs (which stands for personalized web log, as if we needed a new word for personally aggregated content…) is an interesting marketing and promotional tool. In a nutshell, an Amazon customer who has turned on the service sees weblog entries from authors of books that customer has purchased. Messages you’ve read disappear (you can recall them at the author’s Amazon blog). And each entry in your plog has a permalink so you can share it with your friends (and potential Amazon customers).
I suspect a clever programmer could use existing RSS feeds from authors’ blogs (for those authors who have blogs on the public Internet) and add recent entries to an author display from the catalog. Probably only best sellers and authors with good marketing teams behind them have their own blogs, but it could be an interesting start.
[Via LISNews.]
Citing Blogs with Refworks
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.
Feeds without a Blog
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.
[Via TechCrunch.]
LibraryThing — Now RSS-Enabled
Tim Spalding has upgraded LibraryThing to include a few RSS feeds (151,440, to be precise) for its online catalog. Feeds include books cataloged by each LibraryThing member, reviews by each member, reviews of your books, all books given a specific tag, and reviews of books with a given tag. Phew! Tim has been busy.
This type of activity would be great for a traditional library — letting patrons see what other patrons are reading (assuming the patrons have opted in to the sharing of their reading lists). What might be interesting is to tell the catalog what it is you’ve read and then publish new books as you read them; others who have read the same books might be interested in receiving your newly-found books. This could even be done anonymously, if groupings of books read by the same people could be identified.
Blog Visualizations
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.
Where RSS Is Leading
Coming soon: The RSSTroom Reader. Think of the possibilities for expanding readership of your feeds to all your public facilities! (Full details are available here.)
I think the end-of-year hustle and bustle is getting to me.
Dissertations from ProQuest by Subject
ProQuest is now offering RSS feeds by subject for its PhD dissertation collection. There are feeds for about 30 subject areas in education, engineering, biological sciences, earth & environmental sciences, political sciences, sociology, and physics. While there are still some gaps in subject coverage, this is a great start. They also have separate set of feeds tailored to business school curricula.
Blogs as Patron Intelligence
In one of today’s Library Stuff posts, Steve points to Tufts student Dan Bruno’s personal blog, in which Dan comments on the breadth of resources available through the Tisch Library, the undergraduate research library here on my campus.
As a librarian, I find it gratifying when a customer takes the time to say thanks for the resources provided through my professional colleague’s efforts. But what I found even more interesting was that several of my colleagues commented on Dan’s post!
Which brings me to the point of this entry. No, I’m no commenting on the intelligence of library patrons. I’m thinking more along the lines of “competitive intelligence” or good old-fashioned “market research.”. How many of us have set up a Bloglines or Technorati or whatever other RSS-delivered search for the name of our own institution? I hadn’t, until today (http://technorati.com/search/%22Ginn+Library%22). Wouldn’t it be a shame to miss out on feedback — positive or negative — because I wasn’t looking for it in the right place?
[Via Library Stuff.]
Microsoft’s New SSE Format: Bi-Directional RSS
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:
Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) … defines the minimum extensions necessary to enable loosely cooperating applications to use RSS as the basis for item sharingâthat is, the bidirectional, asynchronous replication of new and changed items among two or more cross-subscribed feeds.
For example, SSE could be used to share your work calendar with your spouse. If your calendar were published to an SSE feed, changes to your work calendar could be replicated to your spouse’s calendar, and vice versa. As a result, your spouse could see your work schedule and add new appointments, such as a parent-teacher meeting at the school, or a doctor’s appointment.
SSE allows you to replicate any set of independent items (for example, calendar entries, lists of contacts, lists of favorites, blogrolls) using simple RSS semantics. If you can publish your data as an RSS feed, the simple addition of SSE will allow you to replicate your data to any other application that implements the SSE specification.
SSE can also be used to extend other formats such as OPML.
For example, SSE could be used to share your work calendar with your spouse. If your calendar were published to an SSE feed, changes to your work calendar could be replicated to your spouse’s calendar, and vice versa. As a result, your spouse could see your work schedule and add new appointments, such as a parent-teacher meeting at the school, or a doctor’s appointment.
SSE allows you to replicate any set of independent items (for example, calendar entries, lists of contacts, lists of favorites, blogrolls) using simple RSS semantics. If you can publish your data as an RSS feed, the simple addition of SSE will allow you to replicate your data to any other application that implements the SSE specification.
SSE can also be used to extend other formats such as OPML.
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.
[Via Library Clips.]