Fun with Meebo!

I already used Meebo as a means to login to my MSN account when I'm away from home, but I didn't know about being able to implant such a cool little widget! I was totally pleased about that! Actually, MSN isn't really my first choice anyways. I fell into my current IM configuration out of necessity. I haven't really been much for chatting since the old days of AOL through a 2400 baud modem. By the time I felt the need to re-initiate myself, the people I wanted to talk to were spread all over the spectrum of IM services. Right now, my sister uses Yahoo!, one of my brothers uses AIM, the other's on Gtalk, my ex-girlfriends are all on MSN (curious…), my old friends from college use Silc, one website I frequent requires IRC, we're on a jabber network at work…So I don't think I really talk to that many different people, but they're ALL with different services! That's why at home I just run Pidgin (Formerly Gaim). I can make accounts here and there to talk to each of my different friends, and then tie it all back together at home. Meebo is nice, because it can do the same thing, only it follows you wherever you go!

In a library context, I can see some potential for IM as a reference tool. Really, the only way to know how well it would work and to root out potential problems is to try it out and see what works. I would like to add a caveat, however. I don't think that using a Meebo widget or any other proprietary third party free service would be the ideal choice for anything beyond a trial run. It's one thing if we're paying somebody for support and guaranteed uptime, but many of these services are on an as-is basis. If something breaks, we would not have control over how long it's broken for. Therefore, my first impulse would be along the lines of an open protocol such as jabber running on a server that we own. In fact, we already have this in place, it's just being used for staff only right now. If we were to try and use it for public reference, we'd want to keep it isolated from the staff network in some way. We don't need our metaphorical gravy escaping from our proverbial mashed potatoes and drowning our hypothetical peas. That's my opinion!

Finding more stuff for RSS

For sites and resources that I'm already aware of, I find that the easier way to add them into my RSS reader is through my reader's interface. It takes only a moment or two to search for it and disambiguate the results.

If I'm looking for new resources, a find a compiled list to be much more usable than a full-fledged search engine. For instance, when looking for library blogs http://liswiki.org/wiki/Weblogs is much easier to use then, say, http://www.technorati.com. The former is more cleaner, more focused, and less busy than the latter. Of course, you work isn't half done for you ALL the time, so in the absence of these resources a search engine comes in handy.

I can see a few ways in which RSS feeds could be effectively used by the library. It could be used as a replacement for the library newletter. The same content would be pushed out, but in more a trickle than a flood. It could be used to inform or remind patrons of upcoming events as they approach. It could inform users of policy changes, holiday or inclement weather closures, election results, or other issues that would benefit from being published immediately rather than waiting for a weekly or monthly newsletter. Actually, if implementing this were my project, I would probably shy away from replacing the newsletter as a whole and just pushing out important or time-sensitive stuff. I've noticed that I tend to ignore my more prolific feeds in favour of the sparser ones. I just don't have time to go back and read all 462 Slashdot items. I will, however, get around to my 3 xkcd.com items and my 5 The Book of Biff items.