.. but not here

According to the Google Reader Blog the new search box is located directly above the reading panel to the right of the Google Reader logo. A pity I can’t see it here in Firefox. According to the blog it lets you search your subscribed feeds. If you want to do a blog search outside of your feeds then get thee hence to Google Blogsearch.

A quick check in Opera, my second browser of choice, revealed nothing. A totally blank page! I did, however, manage to spot the elusive search box in IE 7 and it seems to do what it claims.

I am doing a repeat of my Basingstoke RSS, Blogs and Wikis presentation at Woking Library on Tuesday, 20th February. It is being organised by the Surrey Library & Information Group and kicks off at 6 pm. All those who work or have worked in Library and Information services in Surrey and the surrounding areas are welcome.

If you are interested in attending please contact Hilary Ely, Surrey County Council Libraries & Culture, East Area Office, Omnibus, Lesbourne Road, Reigate, Surrey RH2 7JA by Wednesday 14th February 2007, e-mail: h.ely@surreycc.gov.uk Tel: 01737 737687 Fax: 01737 737649.

As an aside, I am delighted to see that the Hampshire and Isle of Wight sub-branch of CILIP’s South East Branch, and who invited me to give the talk at Basingstoke library, now have a blog at http://hiow.blogspot.com/

This is a very useful article by Janet Peros, legal reference librarian and co-chair of the Law Library Association of Greater New York’s education committee. It outlines the use of blogs and RSS feeds in several US legal firms, and how they have been used to replace newsletters for keeping partners and clients up to date. In some instances the mini case-studies mention the software and services used to publish the blogs and generate feeds. The motivation and reasoning behind the decisions to switch from conventional alerting services that are discussed in this article are relevant to any type of organisation in any country. The article is a good source of ammunition for those of us in the process of persuading colleagues and managers that blogs and RSS are a good idea!

Created by Digimind, this is an excellent overview and introduction to blogs and RSS and how they can be used in competitive intelligence. It includes an extensive list of references and further reading. Highly recommended if you are wondering what all the fuss is about and whether or not you should leap onto the bandwagon.

Thank Heavens! Google has totally redesigned its RSS feed reader. The old interface was a disaster: hideous, confusing and non-intuitive. I suspect that many users who were new to RSS feeds have given up on the technology forever as a result.

Having got that whinge out of the way how does the new reader compare with what is already out there? For starters, the default display will now be familiar to existing RSS junkies like me. The left hand side of the screen lists your feeds, and in folders if you have decided to organise them in that way. The individual items are displayed in the central area of the screen, and there is a tips and tricks box on the right hand side of the “Home” page.

Google Reader now allows you to view just new items, all items in a single list, all items by folder or items by individual feed. For me, a variety of viewing options is essential. I need to view individual, priority feeds as soon as I fire up my reader in the morning but I am then quite happy to scan through all the UK news feeds, for example, as one long “folder” list. The only serious gripe I have with the display of the items and feeds is that Google Reader does not include the feeds own icons. It may seem a minor point but it is a quick way of identifying the feed source when scanning through a combined list of all your new items. One point to watch is that the default in Expanded View is to mark items read as you scroll through them. This is a feature that I find extremely irritating but is easily put right by going to Settings, Preferences.

There are two ‘views’ for items: Expanded View gives you the title, source and as much of the article that the publisher has decided to include in the item. The List View gives you the title, the first few words of the article and the date in just one line. To view the original or source document just click on the title or the double chevron next to the title.

For each item you can Star, Share, Email, Mark as read and Edit tags. When I tried these out only the Email and Mark as read options worked: the others gave an “error has occurred message”. But it is early days with the new interface so hopefully these glitches will be addressed soon. The email option defaulted to my Googlemail account so there could be a problem if you want to send headlines or stories to colleagues and clients using your corporate email account. Other web based readers such as Newsgator use your default email reader. Also, you cannot send more than one headline or item per email - a failing with many web based RSS readers. Another notable omission is that you cannot keyword search your feeds or set up alerts, again a non-feature of most web based readers.

You can easily import and export your existing list of feeds and adding a subscription is straightforward. Google Reader, though, does not support user authentication so if you have Factiva feeds, for example, it is back to your PC based reader or Newsgator.com.

Overall, I am impressed. Until now I have been telling RSS newbies who want to just dip a toe in the RSS stream to avoid Google’s reader like the plague. It is still not perfect, and I shall continue to use Omea on my laptop, but I have now added Google Reader to my list of recommended web based readers.

Before the revamp..

After…

Alacra have always been keen to try out and use the newer technologies - they already have a blog and a wiki - and now Alacra Store is offering free RSS feeds on all of its Company Snapshots. Anyone can subscribe to company-specific RSS feeds containing credit and investment research from premium content publishers such as CreditSights, Moody’s Investors Service, and Thomson Financial. You simply search by company, click on the RSS button on the Company Snapshot page, and add the URL to your feed reader. The alerts are free but you will have to pay to view the full documents. Alacra Store works on a pay per view basis so you don’t have to worry about hefty up front subscriptions - just get your credit card out.

In addition to the company-specific feeds, there are several publisher-specific feeds that enable you to track all of the latest content from a given provider:

CreditSights -
http://www.alacrastore.com/storecontent/publisher-rss/creditsights
Fitch Ratings -
http://www.alacrastore.com/storecontent/publisher-rss/fitch-ratings
Moody’s Investors Service -
http://www.alacrastore.com/storecontent/publisher-rss/moodys
Newstex - http://www.alacrastore.com/storecontent/publisher-rss/newstex
TF Investext -
http://www.alacrastore.com/storecontent/publisher-rss/tf-investext
Thomson StreetEvents -
http://www.alacrastore.com/storecontent/publisher-rss/thomson-streetevents

Even better would be the ability to have RSS feeds that monitor a company name within a provider, for example Lukoil in Newstex, but this is a good start. I wish more premium information providers offered RSS alerts.

I spotted this list via Peter Scott’s RSS Compendium Blog. As the title says, this is a list of RSS feeds provided by the major UK national newspapers: The Guardian, Times Online, Independent, FT, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Mirror.co.uk. and the Scotsman. The BBC feeds are also included.

SPG Media RSS Feeds

This is a really neat site from UK based SPG Media. RSS news feeds, compiled from news sources world-wide, are organised by sector for example energy, telecoms, transportation. The emphasis is on technologies and the companies that supply them. Feeds are available as both ATOM and RSS.

In addition to the news feeds, there are 28 sector specific technology web sites. Each site provides information on industry projects in production or under development, an A-Z company index of contractors and suppliers, a catalogue of companies by product or service, a diary of relevant exhibitions and conferences, and a list of industry organisations.

lazytom’s FeedJumbler is a web-based application that allows you to merge several RSS or Atom-based feeds into a single RSS and/or Atom feed. You can also convert an RSS or Atom-based feed into RSS, Atom and/or HTML and JavaScript. You enter the URLs of your source feeds and it generates a link to your merged feeds, which you can put into your feed reader. Alternatively you can register with FeedJumbler to get a personalized page where you can keep track of your merged feeds.

It is similar to RSSMix but there does not seem to be any limit to the number of headlines in your merged feed - with RSSMix it is 20 - and no limit to the number of feeds that you can combine. Any more than 4 or 5, though, and I think the resulting mega-feed would become rather unwieldy to scan.

MindBranch - RSS Feeds: ”

MindBranch, a market research aggregator, is now offering RSS feeds that alert users to new reports in specific industry sectors. There is a separate feed setup for each branch and industry in the MindBranch catalog. Each feed contains the title, description, publication date, and a link to detailed information on the 10 most recent reports published.