Library Stuff

There is an article in the Circuits section of the NYT about weblogs, collecting content from them, and searching them. Feedster gets a well deserved mention:

“Many blog publishers, and some traditional news sites, have embraced the digesting trend by offering feeds of their content in standardized formats. A site called Feedster monitors half a million such feeds and makes them searchable, adding new blog entries to its results less than an hour after they are published.”

Ironically, Kinja gets more play in the article, and it’s not even out yet, even though the article says it is (maybe it will be in the AM – we’ll see). A quote from the article re: Kinja:

“The site automatically compiles digests of blogs covering subject areas like politics and baseball. Short excerpts from the blogs are included, with links to the complete entries on the individual blog sites. After signing up for a free account with Kinja, users can enter the addresses of their favorite blogs and generate a digest – a customized blog of blogs.”

Ummm, Blogdigger Groups, Feedpapers, or Rollup anyone? Journalists really should do their homework first before they publish this stuff. Oh well, at least Feedster got some play.

Today, my firm, Rivkin Radler, issued a press release [PDF] about the Movers & Shakers award that I received this month. Not only that, but the marketing department sent the press release via e-mail to the entire firm, which was thrilling for me. Even the managing partner, a man whom I have much admiration for, took the time to put in a few words.

I work in the corporate world, one that is fast-paced and stressful at times and I’m glad that my work is not only respected and an asset to the company, but that I am recognized for it. It’s difficult for librarians to find both in the corporate world. My advice is that if you have it, hold on tight.

From an article in the NYT:

“Many museums had a similar reaction when they first encountered the World Wide Web. Even the stodgiest administrators knew it was cool, but they also sensed there were aliens at the helm. Now, after a decade of experiments with online exhibitions, e-commerce ventures and Internet-based artworks, museums are focusing on a mission that is much closer to home: building educational Web sites for young audiences.”

Librarians should be working with museums to help build kid-friendly web sites. Not only that, as the article points out…

“Museums may also be filling a curricular void at a time when schools are more intent on raising test scores than cultivating new art and science lessons. And if a school district cannot afford the bus for a field trip, the Internet can still deliver materials to the classroom.”

Yes, yes, yes!!! But where’s the discussion about including libraries? It only seems logical to me for all three to work together.

Amnesty International USA is offering up a bunch of RSS Feeds. Some of them are continent specific (Americas, Middle East, Europe, etc), and there are two for latest news and reports. Go Amnesty!! (link via Syndic8)

Dave mentioned Julian Bond’s note about getting a Cease and Desist for his Google News RSS feed parser that he has been supplying for well over two years!! Which tells me that Google is probably working on getting their Google news out of beta. Why else would they wait so long?

Anyway, here’s a neat way to get Google news in your aggregator. If you use Bloglines (which many of you do), create a news alert using a Bloglines e-mail address. Or, if you don’t use Bloglines, create an alert using a Mailbucket e-mail account. This latter idea should work for all aggregators: the former, only for Bloglines. Enjoy.