I heard over Twitter that Steven Cohen had decided to usurp one of the conference rooms after a program cancellation. He gave a presentation that folowed up on a series of articles he’d written called “What’s in Your Wallet?” It was nice to meet Steven after following him online for over a year. I’ve been a fan of Steven’s since I saw him speak at CIL a few years ago, and he didn’t disappoint me this time.
In this somewhat spontaneous talk, Steven opened his RSS reader up and showed us all how he manages to keep up with over 900 feeds, and what he’s reading. I kept a pretty good list (see below), but also found myself visiting URLs and quickly bookmarking them in a CiL 2008 folder so I can go back and give them each a thorough once-over later.
Here are some of the great tools/tips that Steven shared:
- Subscribe to feeds for your users interests, and email the news to alert your users of relevant updates. (Note: I like this use… it’s sortof a hot-potato way of catching information and tossing it to your users)
- Get feeds from YouTube for stuff you like or use Youtube.com/rss/search/KEYWORD.rss or youtube.com/rss/search/keyword1 keyword2.rss, where Keyword= your search term.
- Google News feeds & Yahoo news feeds (Steven reminded us all that we should search more than one. Never rely on just Google)
- The reference interview ends when the project ends… not when the person leaves the library/chat window/etc. Get contact info. and use feeds to continue to supply information until the project is done.
- Tweetscan - get RSS feeds of a search of Twitter posts
- Blog search RSS feeds (who is writing about you?)
- Technorati (just enter the url)
- Use “intitle:subject” to target your Google News search (so your RSS feed isn’t overwhelming or a waste of time)
Thanks to Steven for a fun and informative look behind the curtain!
