Thing 3 - RSS. Keep it real simple, please.

All right, I'm rethinking my previous snark re: video. Lee LeFever's "RSS in Plain English" is a brilliant example of using video well to relay information. It's extremely effective using a very simple, low tech approach (markers, white board, and sheets of paper). And instead of a talking head, he uses a talking hand. Great stuff.

Well, RSS does seem pretty straightforward to set up. It's also pretty clear that for either personal or professional interests it would be an efficient way to check for new developments in an area of interest. As always, the trick would be to first discover those sources of information that are worth paying attention to. Even though aggregating the information in one place helps manage the info inflow, it would be easy to over-subscribe to feeds and swamp yourself with too much information to take in effectively. In fact, one of the sites whose RSS feed I just added to my Google Reader had a special feed of only 'top stories' in case their regular feed was "filling up your feedreader faster than you can empty it."

Seems also that RSS is an obvious add-on to a library's website for news or event information that people might want delivered to them.