Tuesday, October 7, 2008

RSS

I agree that RSS can be a time saver in that you receive news as it happens, without having to go out and look for it or look for updates at a favourite website. However I have previously subscribed to something similar in the past, email distribution lists, and I found that as my interests changed the usefulness could quickly lessen. Then the temptation is to just delete the news posts as they come in and never actually unsubscribe officially. There's a lot of unwanted and unread info that lands in our email inbox that never gets cleaned up and I wonder if this could happen with RSS too. There is an interesting application I heard of recently in the media however. It's not exactly RSS but similar. The service is for Manly Jetcat commuters and every time a ferry service is cancelled you get notified on your mobile. I think you register for which service you would normally catch and then if there is delays or cancellations you get a message. This could be handy if you catch the same service every day all the time which most people don't, but it's still an interesting application that could be useful. I'm sure there's many applications for the Library with RSS to clients, as long as they don't require excessive maintenance as then resourcing always becomes an issue.

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