Blog Addiction!

http://www.yorku.ca/jdupuis/brownbag.htm

• What are Weblogs?

• From Wikipedia:

A weblog (usually shortened to blog, but occasionally spelled web log or weblog) is a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles, most often in reverse chronological order. Early weblogs were simply manually updated components of common websites. However, the evolution of tools to facilitate the production and maintenance of web articles posted in said chronological fashion made the publishing process feasible to a much larger, less technical, population. Ultimately, this resulted in the distinct class of online publishing that produces blogs we recognize today. For instance, the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of "blogging". Blogs can be hosted by dedicated blog hosting services, or they can be run using blog software on regular web hosting services.Weblog examples:

• Some Types of blogs

• Personal diary: Walt Crawford, Kathryn Cramer
• Community: GTA Bloggers
• Current awareness: LISNews
• Professional: LibraryStuff, EngLib, Catalogablog
• Tools -- weblog software is a kind of content management system:
  • Blogger (software on Blogger's server)
  • Moveble Type (software on your server)
  • WordPress (either)
  • Bloglines (software on Bloglines server)

 

• What is RSS?

From Wikipedia:

RSS is a family of web feed formats, specified in XML and used for Web syndication. RSS is used by (among other things) news websites, weblogs and podcasting. The abbreviation is variously used to refer to the following standards:

• Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
• Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0)
• RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)

Web feeds provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other metadata. RSS, in particular, delivers this information as an XML file called an RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel. In addition to facilitating syndication, web feeds allow a website's frequent readers to track updates on the site using an aggregator.

 

• News/RSS Aggregators:

From Wikipedia:

An aggregator or news aggregator is a type of software that retrieves syndicated Web content that is supplied in the form of a web feed (RSS, Atom and other XML formats), and that are published by weblogs, podcasts, vlogs, and mainstream mass media websites.

• Aggregator examples:
  • Bloglines (web-based)
  • Feedreader (downloadable client)

So, let's get started with Bloglines...

• www.bloglines.com
• click here to register
• Fill in the form & register -- please use your York email
• go to mymail & login
• confirm your subscription
• back to www.bloglines.com & login in

Some tips of adding feeds:

• look for words like feed, xml, atom, subscribe
• right click on the feed url and "copy link location" -- this is the link you need to paste into your bloglines

Now, let's add a few feeds (work related for now)

• LISNews
• Kept Up Academic Librarian
• Catalogablog
• ACRLog
• LibraryStuff
• Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog
• Information Wants To Be Free

Some York Blogs

• YorkBibBlog
• Ereport
• Infoquisitive

Some Blog Directory & Discovery Sites

• 2006 Best Blogs -- a good place to start
• LIS Wiki -- probably the most complete
• Carnival of the Infosciences -- fun stuff every week
• BlogBib -- Select Library Blogs
• LISFeeds
• Open Directory

Journals are starting to feed their tables of contents

• Directory site (slightly out of date)
• Nature
• Ingenta
• IEEE & Annals of the History of Computing

Some News Sites

• InsideHigherEd (not a blog, but does have a news feed)
• Google News has feeds!
• The Star
• New York Times
• Scienceblogs

And some for fun too...

• Unshelved library comic strip
• Google blog search is a good start
• Technorati -- a blog search engine
• Simply Recipes is a good one to start
• as is Blog of a Bookslut
• can also subscribe to podcasts

Some general tips

• When you start getting a lot of feeds, it's a good idea to add folders to your bloglines
  • You add new folders in the "Edit Subscription" link for each feed
• If you find a blog you really like, check out the other blogs they list in their blogroll
• also, searching on a blog in Technorati can give a good cross section of blogs that link to that one
• Try the Easy Subscribe button (info at bottom of left window in Bloglines) which you can add to most browsers
• Watch for "Subscribe with Bloglines" buttons on many blogs that make it easy to sign up

May 23, 2006.