Non-RSS readers of this blog (are there [m]any of you out there?) may have noticed that I’ve been adding a series of links listed as Reading on the right of the page, right next to the most recent post.
This is a list generated thanks to Google Reader, which allows you to “share” blog posts as you go through them. I like this feature very much – such a nifty way of marking and pointing to interesting posts and creating a link blog. Apart from embedding these links in your blog, they’ve also made it possible for you to share your entire link blog, should you want to. Robert Scoble shares his (there’s a link on his blog), as does Steven Cohen (he’s also got a post asking people to share the links to their shared items).
One feature I do wish was available as part of the shared items feature, is the ability to annotate an item (a la del.icio.us).
I’m still maintaining (ie I haven’t deleted) my Bloglines account, but that is because I use it when I show people how to use RSS. I still haven’t worked out what I’m going to use instead of Bloglines in the classroom situation. Google Reader is fine and works very well, but the fact that you need a Google account to use it might be an obstacle to some. Although you could argue that you need a Bloglines account to use Bloglines (a Yahoo account to use Yahoo, a Yahoo account to use Flickr- bah!, a del.icio.us account to use del.icio.us…). I have a keeping-up-to-date (alerting services and RSS) class to teach next week, it’ll all come to a head then, I suspect.
3 Comments
The “which aggregator to show others” question..one I’m grappling with right now.
Eventually – and we’re talking a lot of months – our university student portal should allow people to set up their own feeds. That’s a big advantage for user ed. classes, helping people on the ref desk and allowing access to authentication only resources – as the user will have to authenticate initially so we can just pass the feeds straight to them.
BUT..until that day, I have the same dilemma as you. Bloglines is a bit like odeo – a great idea that worked very well for a long time, but now seem to have reach unacceptable inefficiency – possibly due to such a high demand. Classic victim of its own success.
My gut feeling is to get them a google account and show them the reader. Don’t mention all the other fun stuff you can do with a google acct, just treat it like a regular aggregator.
Netvibes would also be an interesting alternative.
I considered for about 5 seconds showing people the feed reader in Firefox, but that isn’t our SOE. We haven’t even had IE7 approved for on campus use 🙂 The big advantage is that IP protected feeds (like for our internal blog) can be read by a browser on an IP allowed machine, but not via an external machine service like bloglines or google reader. How to cope with these is still a problem for me. Any ideas?
To Kathryn –
Why would your library feeds not be available from people out on the net using bloglines?
Feeds are just served out using http just like web pages. If people outside the campus can see the web pages there should be no reason why they they couldn’t see the feeds.
Unless of course Murdoch has done something silly and the web server is blocking all https traffic that doesnt have a .html extension. That would be highly unusual and very short sighted though.
Ack silly me, not reading properly. Murdoch have IP protected the feeds and not the webpages? Why? A feed is just the same as a webpage, it’s standard web content.
At Curtin we set up almost all our web content as universally available (open to the world and beyond). If it’s not meant for anyone but students then it’s password protected, not IP protected.