RSS feeds, bloglines and blogroll

As you will notice, I have put my blogroll from bloglines as a link into this blog. There it is looking great on the right hand side of the page. The address you can use to look at material I post at bloglines is http://www.bloglines.com/public/greenie

I think my first sentence may break a record for how many times blog can be mentioned in a sentence. Sorry about that.

I feel that the bloglines concept is something that I could introduce immediately to patrons at our library who are regular, confident computer users. I only have space to run very small classes on computer related topics. With the right lealfets and targetting at those patrons I believe that there would be a very high take up of this facility. Many patrons come to the library very regularly to keep up with their favourite blogs, web sites etc. This would make the whole process much quicker. Next year I am to propose some computer training that I can do and I can see already that I will offer this.

In addition, I can see how you may be able to provide already compliled lists of RSS feeds that may suit broad areas of interest. This would require consultation with librarians across our service, as one of the challenges that immediately occurs to me is the potential concern about providing publicity for sites that may not be authoriative or appropriate. One of the key resources that libraries can provide to the community is confident access to authoriative information and I wouldn't want to undermine that. So there may need to be protocols that would be developed around it. On the other hand, libraries can be great places for cutting through all the gumph to get to the right information quickly, so hopefully it is possible. I could see tailored blogrolls on:
- geneology
-reading/books/literature
-current topics eg. we already have web based info on issues like climate change
-film
-sport
-particular genres eg crime, romance, russian novelists etc etc
-local community
-world events/politics
-environment
-farming, both organic and mainstream
-viticulture
just to name a few.

This has all been very interesting and inspiring.