RSS induced overdose

I like the idea of RSS. Being a newsjunkie, there a lot of websites that I continuously look at - ABC, SMH, Age, Guardian etc. - to get my fix. I also keep a lot of blogs in my favourites folder to be looked at everyday. Having them fed to one place certainly makes things easier.

For my Library RSS I've picked a selection of items along this line. Powerhouse of course, the world news feed from The Guardian, international and domestic news feeds from the ABC and, for fun, the Science Show with Dr Karl from Triple J. There are piles of others I could have picked, but I'll save those for later.

The obvious use for RSS in libraries and work situations is to use them to monitor journals, news sites, blogs etc. that are relevant to your work. Rather than constantly going back to peruse sites and potentially missing new developments, you can have them sent to you and, in theory, you won't miss anything. The drawback that I can see, and it's minor, is that a reader account can be overloaded with feeds to the point where a person cannot be bothered to trawl through every feed thay are receiving. I've already noticed this with the ABC feeds. They send every little news update, which can be overwhelming to read. You really have to skim through them for what's interesting or relevant., which almost defeats the purpose of having a feed in the first place. Or maybe I just have to be more selective in what I pick. Also you can fall prey to not looking for new sites that are relevant, and just looking at the feeds you are already getting. As I said though, these are minor points.

For libraries in particular, I would say that they could be used to monitor not just library specific developments, but also to monitor publisher and historian websites for anything that might be useful. Also, any sites or blogs of library users. They're our clients after all and we should be paying attention to what they are saying. How else do we improve?