Ballad in Plain E

I listen to Z95 in the morning while I’m getting ready for work. For me, one of the more entertaining segments is Battle of the Sexes – not because I really care who comes out looking smarter, but because it’s interesting which questions they think will be challenging for each sex. The guys get questions about soap operas, cosmetics, and baby products. The ladies get questions about cars, sports, and Maxim magazine (the questions usually remind me of the classic SNL sketch Food, Sex, or Cars, but I digress). The other day, they asked the woman this question:

Where would you find an RSS feed?

a) In an army mess hall

b) On a farm

c) On the internet

I was rooting for her, really I was, but perhaps not surprisingly, she chose the wrong answer. I think she chose “mess hall”. Anyway, whether or not the ladies clean up on those tech questions, RSS is creeping is slowly but surely making its way into the vernacular.

Knowing that in coming weeks, my boss and I are holding several hands-on RSS workshops for the members of our firm, our research lawyer handed me a copy of the crappy commuter daily 24 Hours with the Buzz Bishop column circled. The headline read “Tap into the news feed” and he pointed out that it was about RSS, which made our upcoming sessions quite timely.

Fortunately, I didn’t get too out of hand with the mocking that anyone who admits to reading 24 Hours deserves, and actually read the column. Good thing, because lo and behold, ol’ Buzz was talking about about a service I’d never heard of, called Feedwhip. Feedwhip allows you to generate makeshift feeds for sites that don’t offer RSS. I did a little looking digging and found out that Feedwhip has been around for quite a while. I’ve set up a couple feeds to see how they compare to monitoring from WatchThatPage, which I’m fond of but would love to get out of my inbox. We’ll see how Feedwhip works – I’ll report back on that in a few days.

In other RSS news, I came across Jason Eiseman’s RSS Tutorials for Law Librarians (although as Jason says, they’re not limited to law librarians – they’d be helpful to anyone starting out with RSS). We watched them today, as inspiration for our upcoming sessions, and they’re extremely well done. Way to go, Jason!