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Thing 4 - RSS

Thing 4: RSS: Webcam Conversation

What is RSS ?

RSS (or Really Simple Syndication) is a way to deliver frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, images, weather forecasts and podcasts.

Instead of you visiting a website or journal to see whether there is any updated material, the updates come straight to you as soon as they are made.

This symbol on a website indicates that an RSS update is available: . Sometime the RSS icon will look a little different.

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If you left click on the symbol, you can subscribe to new content from that site. All updates will be sent to your RSS reader.

For this session we are using Google Reader, but there are other readers available. For information about these see the library’s RSS Feeds page

Have a look at this YouTube video RSS in Plain English which briefly describes RSS feeds and Google Reader.

Why are we learning about RSS?

There is not enough time in the day to keep up with the large amount of material being produced on the Internet - we need to work smarter not harder. RSS feeds brings the  information  to you without having to worry that you will miss out on something important, interesting or even maybe entertaining.

What you need to do to complete this Thing

Set up a Google Reader account for yourself.

Subscribe to four different types of  RSS feeds:

• ABC news headlines
• a list of new books from the library
• results from a search in a journal database.
• your own blog

How to set up your account and subscribe to four feeds

1. Go to Google Reader . You can also get there from Gmail or the Google search page by selecting either “Reader” or “More > Reader”

2. The first time you use Google Reader you will be asked to log in using your gmail login and password.

3. This video,  Google Reader in Plain English describes how easy it is to set up a feed.

4. Go to ABC News RSS Feeds page

• Subscribe to the the Breaking Stories, News feed by using the feed button.

• Left click on the orange feed icon
• Select Google Reader
• Click “Subscribe Now” if it is offered

6. Go to Murdoch University Library’s new books lists.

• *Right* click on the orange button or the link.
• Use “Copy Link Location” (in Firefox) or Copy Shortcut (in Internet Explorer)
• Go to your Google Reader.
• Click on the “Add a Subscription”.
• Paste the link and click on Add.

7. You can do a search in a journal database and then have any new results matching that search sent to you via RSS or email. Look for the “RSS” or “Alert” buttons in our journal databases.

In this example. Go to this search for “pandemic”  at the Public Library of Science :

• Left click on the orange RSS icon
• Select Google Reader
• Click “Subscribe Now” if it is offered

8. Go to the Participants’ blogs page and click on the links to some of the blogs. Try to subscribe to your own blog.  If there is no RSS icon, then you may have to copy the web address from the address bar into “add subscription” in google reader. See if you can work out how to subscribe to other peoples’ blogs.

If you want to try more….

Go to another web site with an RSS feed and subscribe to that one.

Open up “add subscription” in Google Reader and type in a keyword to search. Subscribe to one of those feeds.

Try setting up an account for your feeds at bloglines or netvibes or in your Outlook mailbox (but be careful about reaching the allocated size of your campus mailbox too quickly).

Find out about more features in the Google Reader Getting Started Guide .

Read more about RSS in Educause’s  Seven things you should know about RSS