Library Stuff

GoogleMania has created a bunch of RSS Feeds for Google News for nine countries with 8 categories within each country. Very cool, but don’t count on it being around too long. (via Del.icio.us)

I didn’t realize how many RSS Feeds PC World has (about 20). Syndic8 only listed one. Most of them are updated daily, which is fine. Color me impressed (again, that’s a dark shade of green).

I need to get a book and threw what I knew about the book into Google (I know, not the first place to look, but I was a bit rushed and figured it might help).

I was shocked to see that the first hit was a link to the WorldCat record for the book I was trying to locate. I’m not sure why it came up first (no rhyme or reason why it would and the other hits on the page weren’t bad either), but it did. Plus, I just had enter NY in the query box and a listing of libraries that owned the book came right up. Hip Hip Hooray!!

I know that Google had started to index OCLC records, but this is the first time that I came up with a hit while doing some research. Plus, a first result is great. I hope that this happens more in the future and that libraries can take advantage of it somehow.

Some great stuff going on at Gigalaw these days. I read in their weblog this morning that they have launched News Around the Web, which uses RSS to bring titles of articles from some top IT vendors (CNET, Wired, etc) onto one page.

Just syndicating titles hasn’t really done it for me in the past. I think it would be more useful if they were to grab a few lines of the text or a summary.

Jenny says:

“Most people won’t take the time to provide the kind of feedback Debra did, so value it when they do. And keep the number of ads down or else we’ll unsubscribe. That is, after all, the beauty of RSS.”

This came after a long post about companies not replying from comments from their users. There are two issues here:

1) Companies that do not talk to their customers are doomed to fail. While this does not work in the search engine world (when was the last time you heard back from Google r Yahoo), it will in other aspects of the online world. Case in point: I once e-mailed Cnet about an RSS issue and heard back from them the next day. And it wasn’t a generic response. It was from a real person. An important real person. My dad has a word for that: Class.

Correlating this to library vendors (a theme these days on LS), if you are lucky enough to receive an e-mail back from one of these companies, cherish it and save the name of the person you corresponded with. If you speak to someone at a conference exhibit, get their business card and e-mail them when you get home to follow up on the conversation. Sometimes they need a reminder. These people want to sell you their products. They should talk to you.

2) About ads in RSS Feeds, I will only keep my subscription active in a feed if the quality of the content outweighs the number of ads. This is not a scientific calculation. It’s a feeling. That said, to this date, I do not subscribe to any feeds that have ads, so that must say something. If Library Journal or Information Today came out with feeds that linked me to full text articles already found on their website and had ads mixed in, then I would probably subscribe. Actually, I would definitely subscribe.