Week 4 Task #9

OK, more on RSS feeds! First thing I did was to visit a couple of sites I already know about and see if I could subscribe - http://taste.com.au has a great feed - if you live in Australia and love to cook, you should already know about this website, so no more information! Found a couple of others using stumbleupon (recommends websites according to your preferences and does a pretty good job at picking interesting ones) and subscribed to those - once the novelty of this wears off I am really going to have to prune these subscriptions, as there is no way I will ever have time to read them all!!
Visited feedster to have a look for information on public libraries - initially received a lot of irrelevancies, tried a phrase search which returned more of the same. Hmmm. The topic search was more interesting. Found a travel website which sounded OK. Overall, not incredibly impressed.
HINT! For those of you working on IE 7, I have a very nifty little button in my toolbar that tells me where a site has feeds.
I added Melbourne news to my bloglines via Topix - wonder how it knows where I live? Also added some Offbeat news (who can resist a good brain-eating amoeba story?) Found that they have a Libraries news section and subscribed to that too. Using "Dandenong" was too specific for a Topic search.
Google blog search made me sigh a little with relief - nothing like a little familiarity sometimes when you're off exploring new worlds. Lots of blogs that mention public libraries, including some belonging to Learning 2.0 participants. Seems as though a lot of public libraries have new books blogs - unfortunately not us, though (as yet). All so easy when you know how! Monash has events listed (love the lovely Google) but mainly American stuff. A search on "Dandenong Library" revealed a blog written by one of our customers - (an "ah ha!" moment for anyone who questions why we are doing this program!) and another - (including a photo of the library! OK, maybe we are only barely visible in the corner of the photo, but still!) and another! right, moving on....
(sooo easy to get sidetracked!) Technorati picked up quite a bit on Dandenong and some incredibly vile racist stuff about the Sudanese. A reminder to me that the net has it's dark side. I also learnt that people are ripping pages out of our manga books (there's that dark side again!). OOo, found Natalie's blog!
Fed up now :-) One last thing before I turn off this computer ... checked out the ANZ Ref Centre and have discovered that it lets you feed searches - which seems like great way of tracking what's going on in the media. I've fed in "Dandenong Library" and have found an article by one of our talented staff and (in some ways thankfully) that's it. *yawn*