Thing 10 - Locate a few useful library related blogs and/or news feeds

Now that you have a newsreader (your Bloglines account or Google Reader account), you can begin adding other newsfeeds that interest you. There are several ways you can locate newsfeeds:

• When visiting your favorite websites -- look for news feed icons that indicate the website that provides it. Often a feed icon will be displayed somewhere in the navigation bar of the site. (Here's an image that contains a sampling of several feed icons).



• Use Blogline's Search tool - Bloglines recently expanded search tool lets you search for news feeds in addition to posts, citations and the web. Use the Search for Feeds option to locate RSS feeds you might be interested in.

Other Search tools that can help you find feeds:

Feedster - One of the largest collections of RSS feeds, Feedster lets you search for feeds in three categories: news, blogs & podcasts

Topix.net - This search tool allows you to locate recent newsfeed items based upon keyword or phrase searching. The tool focuses specifically on news and media outlet RSS feeds for information, not weblogs.

Syndic8.com - Syndic8 is an open directory of RSS feeds that contains thousands of RSS feeds that users have submitted.

**Technorati - Technorati is a popular blog finding tool that lets you search for blogs. Since RSS feeds are inherent to all blogging tools, Technorati Blog Search can help you find RSS feeds for topic specific blogs you may be interested in.
Additonal Resource: Technorati Tutorial on finding and adding your blog

**In Week 8, we are going to talk more about Technorati and how it works with tags and blog posts. So, if you do not get to it this week, please do not worry about it.

NOTE: Even if you did not create a Bloglines or Google Reader account, you can do this Discovery Exercise.

Discovery Excercise:

1. Regardless of where you created an account with Bloglines or Google Reader, explore at least two of the search tools noted above and locate some feeds.

2. Create a blog post about your experience. Don't know what to blog about? Here are some questions to think about ...

Which method of finding feeds did you find easiest to use?
Which Search tool was the easiest for you?
Which was more confusing?
What kind of useful feeds did you find in your travels?
Or what kind of unusual ones did you find?
What other tools or ways did you find to locate newsfeeds?




EXTRA STUFF -- Feed icon information:

In Febuary of this last year, the adoption of a standard feed icon among websites and browsers finally began to assist in stopping the madness and confusion caused by so many variations. So far this icon has been adopted by many websites and browers, including Opera and FireFox, where it displays in the address bar:



The next release of Internet Explorer is supposed to have this as well. For more information about this emerging new standard, see Feedicons.com