Feedonomics

Sue Hodges is a former rock music critic-turned librarian who loves rock ‘n roll, metadata … and her Grazr widget. Sue, who writes at her blog that she is trying to “grow up and become a model citizen,” uses Grazr to keep track of her feed subscriptions, a list that reflects an eclectic taste including technology, book stuff (of course), Aerosmith, Shakespeare podcasts, and digital photography. If you think Sue’s Grazr widget is a model of true librarian style, you can grab it to use on your own site.

Sometimes the lazy Web just comes and smacks you in the face. I’ve wanted to build an collection of corporate feeds for a while, but Easton Ellsworth has done it already in an amazing display of generosity and obsessiveness.

Whenever I want a little private time, all I have to do is turn on C-SPAN’s Book TV, and everyone in my family runs screaming out of the room. Now I can achieve the same effect by just starting one of their podcasts. (Feed/Grazr)

One of the fundamental tenets of Web 2.0 is the speed of development due to the wide range of Open Source tools. Grazr Corp. is clearly benefitting from this, and one obvious example is our dependence on WordPress blogs. We already have over dozen WordPress blogs in use, some public and some private. Our next step is building some Grazr widgets for WordPress to make installaion on WordPress blogs easier. So I was spending some time on the WordPress site today and I found WordPress Planet, which aggregates all the public blogs that WordPress people maintain. Cool, I thought, but why don’t they have a reading list to make it easy to subscribe to all of them at once, so I built one and now we can all subscribe more easily. (Feed/Grazr)

I guess this is another place where the daily newspaper is being made obsolete. (Feed/Grazr)

I remember when I managed a Cartoon of the Day site for Andover.net. We had found a source of unused New Yorker cartoons that we could license. Now you can get better cartoons for free from Hugh Macleod’s site. (Feed/Grazr)

I was planning on going to Gnomedex this year, but I’ve gotten too busy doing things like hiring programmers and setting up payroll. If you can’t make it either, we can both follow along through the Gnomedex feed. (Feed, Grazr)

My daughter is spending the summer in Berlin and has caught World Cup fever. She says the entire country is shutting down for the Germany-Argentina match. (feed, Grazr)

This seems like a really appropriate use of feeds. The FDA posts its product recalls as a feed. I was shocked to discover how often pacemakers and defibrillators get recalled. How do you tell a patient that his pacemaker has been recalled?

Good News Publishers and Crossway Books publish a number of Bible related feeds. I’ve chosen their Bible in One Year feed as today’s Feed of the Day. One thing I remember from the earliest days of the Web was that the best way to get somebody excited about new technology is to show them content they would personally enjoy. While blogs may be too geeky for many people, this might be just the thing to convince regular folks to start using feeds. Each day the next section of the bible is delivered in the feed as text with a link to an MP3 of the material.