I love the simplicity and convenience of RSS and newsreaders.There are several news & commentary sites and a few blogs that I follow on a regular basis, so life became much simpler when I discovered what a newsreader was.
I've been using Google Reader for a few months now, and it's great. From what I can tell so far, Bloglines is very similar, but I like the fact that I only need one account to manage my various Google sites (Gmail, Reader, iGoogle, Blogger, etc.). Using a newsreader is basically like having the news and information sites that you surf to each day delivered to email, organizing everything into one neat place.
Reading items is much more efficient this way, and you can even mark interesting items so that they can be archived and retrieved at a later date.
One way that libraries can use RSS technology is to integrate areas of the homepage with graphical displays, such as a box highlighting newly arrived materials (with hyperlinks to the catalog record so customers can check it out or place holds). I was also going to say that it would be great to have news feeds on the library's Current Events & News Page (Recommended Websites), but I see that they are already there. Bravo! An RSS feed of the library's Program Calendar would also be great if available, as customers could subscribe to this to keep up to date with events at their branch. Actually, that's available also. Hmm, I guess we're off to a good start using RSS feeds.
My public bloglines URL is http://www.bloglines.com/public/gregs23
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