RSS feeds

These are obviously useful, and a good way to stay abreast of a personalised array of developments. I suppose an aggregator could provide a convenient summary of your favourite internet places and organise updates from your favourite sites and blogs all in one place.

I suspect however that most of the time most people browse the internet intensively on a given topic, encountering a combination of sites they are quite familiar with, and sites they have never seen before - led to these latter from following links and trawling search results. When researching, they want to be on the actual sites of interest, not some intermediary.

So for me aggregators have a little in common with spice racks - that is, an organising device that is a little more cute than practical. In theory the idea is hard to fault, but in terms of real kitchen activities you may be using two or three spices almost exclusively. You might be going through kilos of pepper or cinnamon, and need them down on the bench. Not on a shelf, in some false equivalence with the out of favour cardamom and everything else collecting dust and petrifying in dinky little labelled jars.

I suspect these RSS activities skew towards the geek/anorak/trainspotter/fanboy market segment. Libraries could supply feeds on particular areas - children's activities for parents, services for seniors etc. But I suspect the majority of people planning to use a library service simply go the library's site and follow the most promising links. The closest fit I can imagine is a subset like HSC students, where for a defined period, updates advise of talks, coaching and tutoring services, seminars, changes to loan periods for related materials etc. A general libary feed is going to supply too great a proportion of material irrelevant to a given user.