I love RSS, it’s the glue that lets us paste pieces of the web content wherever we want them. What do I mean by that?

For one thing, it makes it so easy to get all the news and info that I want to keep up with, constantly feeding into my Google Reader account. It keeps me ’stuck’ to all those sources without ever having to seem them out.

Nifty RSS tools (like feed2js) make it possible to ‘paste’ constantly updated information on our web sites. Little boxes full of the latest news headlines, book reviews, blog posts, events, etc. – all automatically updating without our help. Nice.

And how about the ability for us to get our library info out into the community?
RSS feeds of library booklists, events, blogs, topical information – we can use RSS to paste that content on our town web sites, on the pages of community organizations, businesses, schools, into library customer’s RSS readers and so on. That keeps those people and organizations constantly glued to our content and info.

And along those same lines, one of my favorite use of RSS – getting content out of our library magazine databases and into the hands of users. Students doing research can paste RSS feeds for subject searches into their own NetVibes (Pageflakes, iGoogle, Google Reader…) accounts and get frequent updates on the latest articles on their topics. Or use subject searches from databases to put something like the lastest consumer research articles on a subject guide page on your library web site. I call it “exposing your databases”! (the photo shows results from a database search showing up on a web page.)

RSS = magic = better connections