My Yahoo Beta Tests RSS Headlines

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My Yahoo Beta Tests RSS Headlines

Everyone is buzzing about the fact that Yahoo is beta testing the addition of any RSS feed to it's My Yahoo portal, a move that may signal an inroad to the mainstream. I didn't want to comment on this until I had a chance to play with it; today I had that chance. Here are some of my observations.

Pros:

The RSS headlines that you choose are automatically placed at the top of my customized page, so I see them right away.
There is a keyword search feature that allows you to find and add content without ever having to worry about the word RSS and what it means. If you re-run a search, the results show the sites to which you are already subscribed.

Neutral:

The feeds default to headlines only, but you can change them to include short summaries.
I don't know if this is permanent, but this would be an aggregator for casual users only because you can only add up to 25 feeds.
The prefatory page says "Choose from any site that uses RSS to distribute headlines," which means if you don't already know what RSS is, this will mean nothing to you, and let's face it - that's 99.9% of web users. There is a link in small text at the bottom of the page to their RSS FAQ that actually does a pretty good job of explaining what RSS is and how to find it. Make the link bigger!

Cons:

You can only display up to 10 posts within one week from a site, which again points to casual use only.
You can't delete or otherwise mark the posts you've already read, so they stay there taking up space on the screen, even though they're not new.

Looking at this from a library perspective, the keyword search (expectedly) leaves much to be desired, but it's an interesting feature.

A search for "libraries" produces 8 results, which include my site and the North Shore Libraries New Books. I subscribed to both.

A search for "library" produces 4 different results, which include the HKUST Library New Books (and media items), as well as David Bigwood's What's New at the Lunar & Planetary Institute and Library Stuff. I subscribed to a couple of these. [Side note: I'm still terribly jealous that HKUST is displaying RSS out of an Innovative catalog and SWAN isn't, but it's on my list to pursue this someday.]

A search for "librarian" returns 7 results, which includes librarian.net, Free Range Librarian, /usr/lib/info, and my site. I subscribed to a couple of these.

A search for "librarians" returns 7 totally different results, which include the Librarians' Index to the Internet and Librarian in Black. I subscribed to LII, just to see what the long weekly list would look like, and I barely get halfway through the alphabet, which means I miss a ton of the resources they send out in their feed.

If you're like me, you think the number of results for those 4 searches are incredibly low, and you wonder where on earth those results are coming from. After all, a search of the Yahoo Directory (not their Google-based web search) returns thousands of hits for each of those terms. Granted, they don't all have RSS feeds, but surely there are more than 8 at the most.

Even stranger, when I re-ran the search for "library" an hour later, I got 33 results. Go figure.

But again deferring to the fact that this is a beta test, this is still a big step in the progress of RSS, albeit one Yahoo should have taken long before now. Still, kudos to them for finally taking it. But what might this mean for libraries?

Well, if I type "homer library" into their keyword RSS search engine, there are no results for my home library. Unfortunately, this is an accurate result because my home library doesn't have an RSS feed. But just imagine if they did. Just imagine if every public library had an RSS feed (which would be easier if they used blogging software to produce feeds for their current news and events) and it could be retrieved and displayed this easily in a major internet portal like My Yahoo. Now that would be progress.

I actually hadn't visited my customized Yahoo portal in quite some time, so I was surprised to find that you can now add a section called "Reference" to the sidebar which adds a search box that indexes several ready reference resources (dictionary, thesaurus, factbook, etc.). It's a crying shame that I can customize my Yahoo portal to my locale for weather, TV listings, and more, but I can't get any type of connection to my local public library there.

All this customization, and I only get the generic reference help that someone on the other side of the world gets. How smart is that? If Yahoo really wants to leapfrog Google, it would be smart to truly localize that "reference" link to the local library and the wealth of information it provides. Commercial databases that only residents have access to, a link to live reference help on the web, and expert guidance and tutorials available 24/7, and the display of the library's headlines.

It's a total win-win situation for both sides. Yahoo goes Google one better (one giant leap better!) and offers more reference services than piddling offerings like Google Answers and their own Ask Yahoo without deploying any additional resources of its own. Libraries get a boost in visibility and the chance to connect with more patrons.

It's a no-brainer, but it's taken Yahoo this long to implement RSS. The question I have now is how long it will take them to realize the power of libraries.