Thing 3 and Thing 4

Bringing The News (...and the noise)

I’ve found the Internet to be the most useful when I’m using it for ‘professional’ reasons (work and school). The personal uses I have for it include communication (email) and news updates. Most of my news comes from newspaper websites (which I feel a bit bad about – for I am a party to the decline of print – which is truly horrifying!) and subject specific websites such as bikehugger.com or madcitydirt.org (to get by bike related news) or pitchfork.com and rollingstone.com for music updates. What I’ve come to discover by just using sites and searching for specific content is that like-minded sites are sometimes connected (I discovered Pitchfork by exploring Rolling Stone – and a ton of bike blogs are interconnected). This ‘community’ of similar content-providers, and the occasional Google key-word search, is what I have largely relied on to find new sources of information.

Then I went looking for blog searching tools, and discovered that I hadn’t even been skimming the surface of interesting sites (I kept my searches to my three top search interests: bikes, music, and sports.) The list of search tools that I found and used is too large to adequately explore and report. A handful of the sites I perused and found helpful were:

• Google Blog Search
  

• Technorati

• Blog pulse

• Blog lines

They all have unique features, but the ones I found to be the most useful had to do with advanced searching options. For example, Blog Lines allowed for a ‘popularity’ search, which let you quickly find the most popular blogs. Google Blog Search let you search for terms in the blog title, and Technorati let you focus on blogs with the highest ‘authority’. All useful in their own ways! After searching for these tools and seeing first hand their potential usefulness, I’m definitely likely to refer to them in the future.

As for librarians, the immediacy that is incorporated with Internet news searches is an amazing aspect. And the more varying news sources a librarian relies on, I think, could benefit reference interactions (not to mention that it's super interesting for the librarian him/herself!) These search tools could be used, as well as something like Yahoo Pipes, to relay content from nearly all disciplines. Very cool.

Overwhelming: a word that comes to mind when attempting to wrap your head around the sheer size of the Internet. Before I discovered the usefulness of blog search tools, I was almost to the point of becoming comfortable with my browsing habits (I had an order in which everything was perused – news first, then music, etc.). Now, with the thousands of sports and news blogs that I found using tools like Technorati, the mere thought of keeping up is futile. But the RSS feed (Really Simple Syndication) is helpful, as it includes text (full or summarized) and some metadata (author and date). Now, with the RSS feed, it’s almost as if I have a subscription to the websites, like to a magazine, which then has them sent to me. (The whole notion of action and the Internet has me hung up a bit…but this collating tool sure is handy).

RSS formats, apparently, really gained widespread use in 2006 (Wikipedia), which makes me feel a little better not having ever used them. When I began choosing select sites that I wanted to keep up with, I found it useful that the RSS feeds could be based on specific content rather than the whole site. For example, with Rolling Stone’s website, the RSS feed allows me to choose what information I want to be sent to me: all news, music news, movie news, culture or politics news – reviews, photos and blogs. If you were to sign up for them all, that is a bunch of stuff. This is a useful and cool way to get only the content you desire. (Again, I wonder though how much can be lost if we all just sign up for what we ‘like’, because for me a lot of searching and discovering comes about through serendipitous means. I think I might miss a lot if I depended on RSS more than just a tool.) I also signed up for the New York Times – Sports and Books RSS feeds. If organized well, having a ton of RSS feeds at your library computer could really contribute to your interactions with patrons regarding 'current events'. News websites are updated multiple times a day, and having an RSS feed can take the hassle and anxiety (!) out of missing one.