Juan Daniel Machin-Mastromatteo, Information Research
I participated, with great honor and pleasure, on the 3rd Conversation with librarians, bibliophiles and archivists, which was organized by Doknos in the National Library of Ecuador. There, I presented the keynote conference titled Libraries and Librarians 2.0: Concepts, categorization of their competencies, comments and ideas. You can check the Spanish version of the post to check out the full keynote (in Spanish).
If you don’t use or like or know what RSS is, maybe this post is not for you, sorry. I don’t know many people who uses RSS and it’s importance in some situations is not clear, for example in the last sites I designed I feel was tasked with setting an RSS just for the sake of it; and very few of the students I have taught in my “social media” lectures actually use RSS. However, I use RSS very actively as my primary channel of receiving information, instead of having to remember every site I have to visit every day to get news. The way to do this is to subscribe to the RSS feed of a site and then I get all the new in my Google Reader. RSS with Google Reader is also a good option to use if you do content curation or dissemination of information to a determined audience.
The problem is, some weeks ago Google changed radically its RSS reader “Google Reader”, in order to support “better” its Google+. The main consequence in the changes they made is that you cannot keep following what the friends whom you follow share, as users’ “shared” feed was killed. We still have Google Buzz for this kind of sharing of our RSS, but Google will be killing it soon as well. The main problem with this change of Reader for me involves the feed (Cool Stuff) I have right here in the blog (upper/right side). This feed was a Google Reader shared feed, the same my friends could use to input on their RSS readers to follow the items I share.
That’s for the rant, now I will tell you how I fixed it. I use many social networks where I post diverse/personal things depending on how open/close I have their privacy settings. So, I had to seek for an option to get the items I want to share out of Reader and into an RSS feed. Currently, Reader has moved all your shared items into “starred” items. It is possible to send every individual item in your feed to Google+, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. The problem with Google+ is that it doesn’t have the possibility to express updates as RSS feeds, the same goes to Facebook. Then, the solution comes from Twitter or Tumblr.
The twitter address for your feeds ishttp://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/[user].rss The problem is that when you paste this anywhere, every item’s title starts with your username.
So, Tumblr it is, the address for your feed is http://[user].tumblr.com/rss
What you need to do is to go to Google Reader, Options, Reader Settings, then click the “send to” tab and check Tumblr. This activates the option to send an item you read to Tumblr and then it gets into that RSS feed and into wherever you want to paste that, being your blog, site, or back again into your Google Reader. BTW you need a Tumblr account also.
Then, every time you read something in your Google Reader you want to share, click the “send to” option of the post, and select Tumblr, then a new window opens where you can arrange how it is published (for example you can paste an embed code if you want to share a video), then it’s done, it’s published immediately in that feed I just told you how to set up.
My first scientific book was just released. Exploring… is a revised and expanded version of my master thesis, it starts from the reflection that social networks are commonly seen as a technology used only for entertainment. However, they can also be used for serious purposes in business and education environments, as they are powerful tools that can accomplish various roles and purposes. This book presents research done from an information science perspective; where the researcher took as a starting point and expanded on the issues presented in Bawden & Robinson’s The Dark Side of Information (2009). Presented with this book are extensive transcripts of the interviewed students and academic staff of a master course, who were asked about the issues of Web 2.0 and social networks identified in the literature, along with the typical features or characteristics of social networks. With the analysis and discussion of the interviews, this book provides insights regarding trends and tendencies of users’ information behavior in social networks, with the aim of contributing to a better understanding of users and the design of such systems. Exploring Users’ Information Behavior in Social Networks was awarded 2nd place in the category of Social Sciences Master Theses at the Students’ Scientific Research Contest of Tallinn University.
In the back of the book, as required by the publisher, there is an extremely short info about me: Juan Daniel Machin Mastromatteo, Bachelor in Librarianship (Universidad Central de Venezuela), Int. Master in DILL (Oslo University College, Tallinn University, Parma University), PhD student (Tallinn University). Has a vast experience in academic libraries in Venezuela, where he led information literacy projects and developed multimedia tutorials and library promotion materials.
You can always go to the Curriculum Vitae page to expand on it 🙂
You can find the book available in Amazon (US / UK / DE) and MoreBooks
Juantífico 