Keeping Current with News and Research   Tags: current_awareness, mann, rss, social_bookmarking  

Probably more than you think:

• News of all kinds (Cornell News feeds, Cornell Daily Sun, NYT, NPR, The Onion, Wired, weather, to name just a few...)
• Blog posts
• Announcements (funding and news from NSF, news from professional organizations such as AAAS and AIBS, and much more)
• New books at Cornell University Library
• Saved searches in databases
• Tables of contents from journals (Nature, Science, PNAS, and may more)

...and plenty of other kinds of NEW content on lots and lots of websites! Here are a few of the things I'm reading:

• Feeds on libraries and higher education
• Feeds on data management/curation
• Feeds from selected scientific publications (mostly ecology)
• Feeds on information technology

"6 million Americans get news and information fed to them through RSS aggregators..."

"Five percent of Internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online. This is a first-time measurement from our surveys and is an indicator that this application is gaining an impressive foothold."

From the Pew Internet & American Life Project (12/05).

Start here (http://youtu.be/0klgLsSxGsU) with this great intro to what RSS is and how it works. (3:43 minutes)

RSS (some people say it stands for Rich Site Summary, some people say it stands for Really Simple Syndication) is a format for publishing web content. It's used to "push" timely information and updates to people who subscribe to RSS "feeds". What's so cool about it is you can collect a bunch of feeds in one place (your reader or news aggregator), log in whenever you like, and see what's new. You don't have to visit all the web sites one at a time, and you don't have to waste your time with old news.

Keep up with more information in less time - try it!

If you want to know more, including some of the technical details, try Wikipedia.