These icons are commonly used to indicate the presence of an RSS feed:

Of the various terms in the Web 2.0 lexicon, RSS may be one of the less familiar.

• RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content such as blogs, news feeds, and Podcasts.

• The initials RSS stand for, among other things, Really Simple Syndication. Instead of you going to all your favorite blogs and websites to see what’s new, you can have the new content syndicated, or published, to you. This is another example of the interactive nature of Web 2.0

• This is what a raw feed looks like: Eye Level, a blog mentioned earlier, has a feed. On a more popular level there’s Netflix-New Releases. The feed file consists of headlines, a short text description and link to a web page. You can cut & paste the web address for a feed into an aggregator.

Since information can be “fed” to you – where do you find it? What you need to receive the information is a feed reader, or an aggregator. Feed readers help organize and deliver RSS feeds you have subscribed to. They will automatically check for and import new content, so you only have to visit one place to see your favorite information. Some feed-readers are:

• Google reader : As with Google Notebook, you need a Google account to have your own Google Reader. You can easily create a free Google Account here. If you already have a Google account, just add Google Reader to it.

• Bloglines : You can create a Bloglines account. Bloglines was one of the first popular readers.

• Technorati – the focus here is on blog feeds.

• NewsGator Online is becoming popular. There is also NewsGator Go which is a mobile version (synchronize your online reader with your Blackberry).

Let’s look at Google Reader. I’ve added a number of subscriptions to Watson Library’s Google Reader. Let me point out:

• That you can see which entries are new (meaning that you haven’t read them). Look at the entries for the New York Times feed of Art and Design.

• That you can see the entire source article (click on the arrow). Look at some entries in American Art.

• That you can “star” items you find interesting

• That you can share, tag and email items.

• You can add a new subscription by finding the URL of the feed and pasting it into your feed-reader. E.g. You can add the Eye Level feed that we looked at before.

• You can also use Google Reader to search for subscriptions. Try searching for the Drudge Report or Winterthur.

• That you can organize your subscriptions into folders. You can unsubscribe very easily, so you can feel free to “try” certain subscriptions to see if you like them.

• That all of this is web based and the content is not impacting your computer space. And the links mean that the content is not duplicated everywhere.

Live Bookmarks

A “live bookmark” is a feature of some web browsers like Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer version 7 that lets you easily add RSS feeds like you would a bookmark or “favorite”. Not everyone in The Museum has Internet Explorer 7, but many do. You usually know that RSS is available from a website when the orange RSS icon lights up. Live bookmarks are, like other bookmarks, machine specific. Live bookmarks might be a good way to test how you like the idea of a “feed” without even opening an account.
For example, we can go to the New York Times RSS page, choose one of their many feeds, and subscribe.

Applications and Examples

• Some journal publishers provide full text of new issues and some provide Table of Contents that are available through RSS. Some of the sites you might look in to see whether any of your favorite journals are available are listed here:
  • Cambridge Journals Online
  • Peeters Online Journals
  • University of California Press (Caliber)
  • University of Chicago Press Journals

• Some examples of journals with RSS feeds that we came across are:
  • Classical Antiquity
  • October
  • Journal of the American Musicological Society
  • American Art
  • Revue d’Egyptologie
  • Winterthur Portfolio

Finding feeds. Finally, there are directories for RSS feeds like http://www.syndic8.com/ and http://www.2rss.com/. Or you can go to your favorite websites and look for the feed icons. It may be obvious at this point that for almost any area of interest, professional or personal, there is a feed that will keep you updated.

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Advanced RSS: filtering feeds

Malcolm (Chair, Photographs) asked in our Web 2.0 presentation yesterday about whether one could ‘filter’ RSS feeds (i.e., subscribe to a feed but then only get the items with the keyword ‘rembrandt’, etc.). We didn’t have a good answer then, but Erika found a couple of tools this morning:

• Feedrinse (this one is much better)
• Feedshake (haven’t had much success yet)

We’ve sampled them a bit and Feedrinse is very straightforward. These are the basic steps:

1. create an account (free)
2. paste in the feed address(es) – you may also batch import
3. construct your filter parameters for each individual feed, and there is a limit of 500 feeds per account. You may limit based on title, keyword, and other fields.
4. export the OPML file and save to your computer
5. import the saved OPML file into your favorite reader (in Google reader, it’s under manage subscriptions/settings > import-export)

If you would like a demonstration, feel free to let a member of the Web 2.0 team know.