RSS: a very, very different way to look at the internet.
I'd heard of RSS, seen people complaining at blogs and comics without it, but having now tried it, I'm very surprised. This is something so easy to do and I never realized how easy it was. Google Reader. Any RSS-capable source beamed to one page, nothing complex about it! For current events, research, or anything like that, RSS looks like an astoundingly useful tool. A student researcher could work so much more efficiently looking for news items, information...
Efficiency in information gathering seems to be the key idea here. However, consider that Google News gathers news from over four thousand sources; consider that there are probably hundreds of thousands of blogs with RSS feed. Where does efficiency in information gathering transition into information overload? It should be easily possible to subscribe to more feeds than could physically be read in a day. I'm interested in how to use this tool efficiently; I want it to work for me, to find what I want it to find and be succinct about it. I'll have to see what I can figure out about that!
1 comment:
James, like you I am pretty new to RSS feeds and still trying to figure out how to use them as a teacher. I certainly can see research advantanges if you want the latest news -- Will Richardson is pretty sure we can easily learn to sort through all the info that comes in, but I think I have to practice it to believe it.
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