Monitoring 3: How to sign up to Feedspot

How to use Feedspot from Sheila Webber

Monitoring 2: Adding feeds to blogger

There are some features on Blogger itself that can be used for monitoring, so you could use these for your team blog. I made this video in 2011 showing two ways to add a feed from another blog onto your team blog. Once you have done this, links to the latest posts on your chosen blog appear on your blog. I’m afraid at the moment I’m not able to make a revised video, but the only changes since then are to do with how you find the page for editing the blog layout. Now (instead of clicking a tab at the top) you click on Layout, which is on the menu on the left hand side of the page.
In this video I firstly demonstrate adding an RSS feed from another blog, so that the latest few posts from that blog dispay on your blog, and then I demonstrate a way of adding a list of blog links.
If you look on this blog: I have used the first technique to add a feed of new articles from the Journal of Documentation (at the bottom of this page) and the second technique to add a list of the team blogs (on the right)

Monitoring using Web 2.0: 1 - what is monitoring and what is RSS?

There will be a couple of posts about monitoring. This is part of the SCONUL 7 Pillars "gather" pillar. By monitoring, I mean keeping up to date with news, new articles, new books etc. A useful way to monitor blogs and journals that interest you (to be alerting to the latest posts or articles) is to use RSS. The little picture above is the symbol for RSS, so look out for that on journal and blog pages.

K12 Learning 2.0 (2012) explains that: “RSS is a special type of computer code that allows users to know automagically when new "stuff" is added to their favorite websites. ... RSS, which stands for Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication, allows web users to subscribe to multiple websites and have new content delivered to them automatically in one location, called an RSS reader. Instead of visiting each website to check for new information, the user simply checks his or her reader, which has collected and organized all of the new content using RSS.”

There is also a video that explains what RSS is in “plain English", here (sorry, I can’t embed it): http://www.commoncraft.com/video/rss
The useful CPD23 blog had a post in which they explain Current awareness (monitoring) and specifically talk about using Twitter and RSS feeds to keep up to date, and Storify to create your own collection of Web 2.0 posts and tweets about a topic. http://cpd23.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/thing-4-current-awareness-twitter-rss.html

How can you find out what the web address (url) is for the RSS feed?

Look for the little RSS logo on a page or simply the phrase "RSS Feed".

Here are 2 screenshots showing how I found the right RSS web address for the Journal of documentation.

Reference:
K12 Learning 2.0 (2012) Thing 5 (Week 3): Getting Started with RSS. http://k12learning20.wikispaces.com/5-rss