A c t i o n f o r L i b r a r i e s — J u l y 2 0 0 5

The Internet Connection

By Michael Sauers RSS Technology Feeds More Than Blogs Those of you with a passing familiarity with RSS (Really Simple Syndication) know that you can use it to automate the reading of blogs. But did you know that there are many other useful and creative applications for the technology? Here are just a few of my favorites.

Simple Syndicated Amazon Price Tracking: www.watchcow.net/
As a regular purchaser of items from Amazon.com, a feature that provides the ability to track the Web store's constantly shifting prices would be an amazing tool. The folks at Watchcow.net give you just such a tool. By subscribing to an individual item or to your whole watch list, you can receive automatic updates of price changes (including prices from the Amazon.com Marketplace) along with tracking the actual percentage of change of each respective price change over the previous several changes. Watchcow.com also provides a handy bookmarklet, which when installed in your browser allows you — with a single click — to create a feed for the item you're looking at in Amazon.com.
The Annotated New York Times: annotatedtimes.blogrunner.com/annotated/nytimes.com/dir/TOPICS.html
The Annotated New York Times "tracks blog postings that cite articles published by The New York Times." The homepage (annotatedtimes.blogrunner.com/) is impressive with its latest The NY Times headlines and direct links to blog postings related to those headlines. But the feature that earns the site a mention in this column (at the URL above) is its more than 400 topic-based feeds. The topics range from Abortion to Writing and Writers. Each topic has a feed for The NY Times articles and for blog posts that link back to those articles. Both kinds of feeds are also available for more than 900 authors from The NY Times.
del.icio.us: del.icio.us/
Del.icio.us (pronounced "delicious") is a "social bookmarks manager," that allows members to post their bookmarks and to add tags — metadata — to each posted link. Users may then search through the combined collection based on the member or associated tags of the bookmarks. The social aspect is "its ability to let you see the links that others have collected, as well as showing you who else has bookmarked a specific site. You can also view the links collected by others, and subscribe to the links of people whose lists you find interesting." The subscription feature is why this site is listed here for its use of RSS. Each tag and user has an associated RSS feed to which you can subscribe and receive automatic notification of whenever a new bookmark relating to your topic of interest or a bookmark by a particular user is added to the system.
Yahoo! Traffic Conditions: ejohn.org/blog/traffic-conditions-data/
In his blog, John Resig announces that he was "poking around the Dashboard Widget archive on the official Apple site and spotted a Yahoo Traffic Conditions widget. This is interesting because they are somehow getting the data from their Web site in an easy-to-parse format. So, I peeked under the hood and, sure enough, there's an RSS feed for traffic conditions!"

Resig's blog entry (at the URL above) tells you how to construct a URL by hand for a feed appropriate for your area and includes a form that allows you to build the feed's URL automatically. Options include the radius around your zip-code for details and the level of a traffic condition's severity (minor, moderate, major or critical) to be included in the feed.

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