Thing 17: Libworm

LibWorm is an interesting RSS feed based website. It has quite a lot of information available. I searched for book challenges and found that the RSS feeder looks for anything with “challenge” in it. It was interesting to note that it does take in U.S. security issues besides challenges on book content. I believed that it would only find the book challenges but it does take in quite a lot of information that may need more filtering to find what you are looking for.

Searching by categories, subjects and tags can be a bit unwieldy. This would be good for looking for random information or to get an idea of what categories contain. If you search by date, it can be difficult to find what you are looking for. Relevance is a bit better though it can be difficult to filter down to what you are looking for if you are looking for anything in particular other than a grab-bag of items.

My library does have a few things listed, however it is mostly old job positions and a message from our keynote speaker, who gave an excellent speech on our staff day. I believe LibWorm is a great example of Library 2.0 but our library is still in need of a few more 2.0 things we are working on. All in all though, the website is interesting for having a smorgasbord of thoughts and information available it its feeds, though use of it every day might not be feasible.

Thing 7: RSS Feeds

RSS is a fairly old system that many people never use. What is great now is that there are readers to capture these and use these to update. RSS can cover many different websites and I did choose to add Unshelved to my Google Reader for the purpose of Thing 7. Much like Thing 6, I am not sure I would want to add too many things to Google Reader since I would likely add way too many things and get overwhelmed with stories and updates I might not necessarily want to read. I realize that can speed up your Internet use, but I do like to see all that a website has to offer instead of a truncated update. The RSS feed can be great fun if it is a small content update like Unshelved or a blog post, though I still enjoy looking at the full website for now. If I feel I need to go faster, I will switch to using more feeds in Google Reader now that I know it is there.