(week 4) so...RSS...we meet again

I understand in principle how RSS can be a useful tool but every time I want to do something with it it doesn't seem to really...work. Not in a technical sense, but more in the sense of it just not seeming to be very efficient, or flexible. For example, a colleague recently asked me to help them set up a feed to inform them of newly repealed Acts. This would apparently save them days of work needed to track down these Acts, to keep our looseleaf versions up to date. But none of the legislation websites seem to offer feeds and I can't set up a feed using a Bloglines or even a Google search as the information is just too granular. Grrrr. Am I missing something obvious?

Other sites that I think "hmm, it would be useful to be able to read a brief summary of what they're posting on" inevitably send the full text of articles to my account - to which I say, "what's the point? I may as well visit the blog! It'd be just as efficient for me to keep a folder of bookmarks to visit periodically" (Because I'm congenitally contrary I signed up with Bloglines instead of Google Reader, but from what I've seen of the Google version it's not a difference in quality between the two which is causing me problems).

There just seems to be a major disconjunction (is that a word?) between my brain and RSS. I think I'm suddenly feeling what other people feel when faced with new technologies - a strange and unfamiliar sensation for one so used to picking up everything technological with relative ease...

For the moment I'm going to press on to the other activities and come back to this when I've calmed down a bit!

EDIT: Okay, a few deep breaths later and I'm back, facing up to my foe. Still not convinced that RSS is for me but I can see it having applications in libraries *if* the feeds provided are customisable and/or thoughtfully created - e.g. a feed of all new acquisitions by SLV is probably not of much interest to our patrons, but a feed of new acquisitions for specific collections like LaTrobe/Genealogy etc may be.

I concede that RSS will be useful for keeping track of those work-related blogs that I make New Years resolution-esque promises to return to but which can easily be forgotten. I still won't be using it visit my favourite music blogs though - those bloggers spend way to much time making their work visually scrumptious for me to strip all that formating away by using an RSS reader.

I've experimented with the EBSCO feeds (created one for the subject headings genealogy and family history) and while my feed wasn't particularly successful (as EBSCO doesn't include many genie-specific mags, so the articles it retrieved were too general to be of interest) I can see that this would be very handy for students and researchers.

And just to conclude my litany of complaints, I find having to log in to yet another account to view my feeds endlessly tedious. I would much prefer a feed reader that integrated with Firefox but those that I tested earlier on in the program barely functioned or were hard for a little ole beginner like me to get a handle on. Come on programmers - how hard is to make things user-friendly!