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Does anyone know of an RSS feed directory that is Australian or features Australian content? I’m getting sick of the American bias of most of the tools suggested.
In summary:
- Syndic8 has too many broken links
- Topix.net does have Australian content, but it’s not worth reading!
- The search feature on Bloglines came up with some Australian listings of quite good quality
- Technorati is a useful tool
- Google blog search also good
- Visiting favourite sites is also a reasonable way of finding quality feeds with useful content, but it is a time consuming method.
Using Technorati, I tracked down the ALIA RSS feed that I could not find previously! I also found the blog of a librarian at Central TAFE in Perth who completed 23 Things in 2007 and who is now teaching others within her workplace, http://maeverest.blogspot.com/
Well, I’ve set up my bloglines account and managed to find 5 newsfeeds to subscribe to. Setting up the bloglines account was easy enough, finding newsfeeds was harder than I expected. I assumed that most of the blogs etc I wanted to subscribe to would have newsfeeds and many of them don’t appear to. For example, I tried to subscribe to the Australian Library Association blog, but was unsuccessful. Perhaps they don’t have a newsfeed, as I couldn’t find the little orange icon. This is a bit strange though.
I did find out that Ultimo TAFE LIbrary has a blog! Staff are using it to promote library resources, update library hours etc. This is encouraging. It might help me to persuade other staff at Hunter Institute that a library blog could be a useful tool for us.
I think tools like bloglines are potentially very useful to librarians. I need to spend some more time investigating tools (feed directories) that enable you to search for newsfeeds on topics of interest.
I am excited about photo-sharing sites like Flickr. I love being able to share images without clogging up everybody’s email inboxes etc. I once emailed a photo to my family (before they had broadband) and it took an entire day to download! Storing digital images is also an issue – my laptop is currently overstuffed with photos that I haven’t sorted yet… Websites that enable you to upload, store, organise and share images are great news.
