RSS continued...

I said in my last post that I wanted to figure out how to make RSS as efficient as possible. I've made a conclusion or two in that direction by now:

First of all, efficiency in using RSS seems to be as much a product of how the reader engages the content as anything else. If each news source could be considered as a newspaper article, then the RSS aggregator has just become a newspaper. I personally don't read newspapers from front page to back; I look over the headlines, skip in a few pages to finish an article or two, check the editorials, then head for the comics. That same skimming action applies to using an RSS reader, too--learning to quickly navigate the content and ascertain what is worth reading up on.

Secondly, it's very possible to cut down on the irrevelent content presented by the reader by using news searches. Subscribing to the feed from the Washington Post's front page headlines provides me with interesting content, but for every article there that I read, there are several more that are just cluttering my reader. I'll grant that the shotgun-content of those feeds has its uses. However, the news search RSS can cut into the news items that I find to be currently relevent much more effectively. This could be a great tool for students.

Suppose some students had been assigned to research an author; they could set up an RSS to return news articles about that author. However, as I experimented with this, I was struck by the necessity of having a good working knowledge of how to use search terms to produce relevant search results. For instance:

Michael Crichton as a search term produced book reviews on the writer's work, as well as articles such as this that examine the issues addressed by Crichton's latest book.

On the other hand, Brian Jacques, which might be a student's first attempt to find news or reviews about the popular children's author, returned news items such as this about a recent murder. Hand-in-hand with the use of this technology in education must come instruction on how to refine search terms. In this case, "Brian Jacques" author might work better, but the student needs to know how to do that!

A few feeds I went ahead and subscribed to, aside from all the class blogs, were the NY Times Science page, the Washington Post front page, and the Grand Rapids Press front page. I set up a few news-search RSS's that I've been changing around since I couldn't come up with anything I wanted to follow very badly; at this point I left it with the Michael Crichton search. I also subscribed to Qwantz, which is a webcomic I like to read.

My News feed has produced such interesting headlines as:

2:07 AM (14 hours ago)
From Spaceflight to Attempted Murder Charge
from NYT > Space by JOHN SCHWARTZ
A NASA astronaut, Capt. Lisa Marie Nowak, has been charged with the attempted murder of a rival for the affections of a fellow astronaut.

and also:
3:06 AM (13 hours ago)
Loneliness Linked To Development Of Alzheimer's
from washingtonpost.com - A Section by Post
Elderly people with few or no friends were more than twice as likely to develop Alzheimer's disease as people who reported that they were not lonely, a study shows.

Those journalists seem to work late to keep the deadlines...