The Wonderful World of RSS
Yesterday was our first 501TechClub brown bag lunch here in Portland. It was pretty wet outside, so we were pretty glad folks showed up to hear the fabulous MarshallK talk about the many fantabulous uses of RSS for nonprofits.
The notes don't do his talk justice, but here they are anyway:
> RSS readers pull in new content from pages you have selected. Instead of you visiting many of your favorite sites and blogs all the time to see if there is anything new, your reader will frequently check those sites and pull back all of the new content for you to browse/read in one convenient place, either on your desktop or in a browser. POPULAR READERS:
> When you see the RSS icon (orange, soundwave looking image) on a web page or in your browser address bar, you know you can subscribe to that page just by clicking on it. You can either choose your reader from the set of options when clicking on the RSS icon, or you can copy and paste the feed's subscribe link (that shows up in the browser when you click on it) into the reader of your choice. Different readers have different steps to add a subscription.
> RSS is not like email: you do NOT have to read everything. Just skim headlines for the important bits.
> It can be helpful to use social bookmarking in partnership with RSS feeds. You can share news you found interesting. Popular social bookmarking sites:
Create a tag for yourself or your group. You can subscribe to the feed for the tag on the social bookmarking site.
> Social bookmarking also lets you create a newswire on your site or blog. Marshall publishes a "to share" feed on his blog at marshallk.com.
> Google blog search. It's like using Google News alerts with your email. You can subscribe to search results from this and most other search sites.
> Marshall uses netnewswire and Google Reader for his big picture, netvibes for the slimmed down version of important reads, and zaptxt for super important things so that notices of updated content are sent to his phone/IM/email.
