Exercise 9: Newsfeeds

Topix, Liszen, Syndic8. Technorati will be covered in a future post.

LISZEN some day will be a useful site for librarians. Currently it boasts to cover 700 library blogs. It needs some help to increase its coverage before it is seen as a first stop search spot.

Of the three newsfeeds visited for this exercise I especially liked Topix. The indexing seemed to give useful results, instead of a “come on” to more advertisements for commercial enterprises. The paid ads were discreetly off to the side and clearly labeled. Furthermore, Topix seemed to view “phrase” (quotation marks enclosing your search terms) as a phrase search and therefore, I did not get miscellaneous irrelevant hits. I liked the “interactive graph of "x topic" in the news.” A very nice feature if one is trying to zero in on a particular time period.

Syndic8 is an extremely well conceived site. The intake information for the sites is very complete (it almost rivals the MARC format). The chart and statistical breakdown on the site are interesting to view and will no doubt serve as a motivating feature for the hardworking Syndic8 staff. I’m very favorably impressed.