Catalogablog, which noticed this blog's existence today has a fleeting mention of RSS as a hip tool. David suggests a feed of "most circulated books, books with most holds." I suppose the RedLightGreen system could provide a feed of the most common books in the "Your List" feature, but... other than being cool and hip, what would this do? More likely to be of interest for folks who want a sense of trends would be the top searches -- a RedLightGreen zeitgeist (pushing our emulation of Google too far).
I don't see any of these ideas really helping users discover books that inform their passions (or the field of study they said they'd stick out to make their parents happy).
I do find myself thinking of RSS as a "better than email" way of reaching users with timely information. I don't think we'd be able to come up with this for the pilot, but i'm beginning to imagine a catalog feed that combines general system notices ("Our Privacy statement has changed.") with localized notices (for all users in these zip codes, not the addition of this new library connection) with personalized notices ("Other RedLightGreen lists that have entries like yours also have the following entries:.....").
Posted by judielaine at July 28, 2003 05:35 PM | TrackBack