Feeds and Mashups

"Feeds and Mashups: A Healthy Diet of Live Content"
Health Libraries Inc Fifth Annual Conference, October 2007
Presentation by Maxus Australia

Step by step: a library mashup...

In addition to software like downloadable RSS readers, Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox 2 and Microsoft Outlook 2007 (all of which sit on your desktop), the great news is that there are also a number of ways of subscribing to RSS feeds via applications that sit on the web. (Incidentally, this is consistent with a very important aspect of Web 2.0, which is that it is seeing the move of more and more resources from "desktop" to "webtop".) What this means is that you can see your subscribed feeds from your office, from your home PC, or from anywhere else in the world where you can get access to the web. It also means that you can choose to expose your feeds to a wider audience if you choose to make them public, or "share" them.

There are a growing number of webtop tools that let you subscribe to feeds, including Yahoo Pipes, IBM’s QEDwiki and Microsoft's Popfly. In the example that follows, we'll use Google Reader – it has been in existence for quite some time and is relatively easy to use.

Step One: Subscribe to Google

Before you can use Google Reader, you need to subscribe. This gives you a Google account and also means that you can access Google Reader from anywhere in the world. Subscribing is straightforward so I won't describe it in detail here. The most important thing to get you started is the Google Reader URL, which is http://www.google.com/reader. When you go to Google Reader, the home page includes the following login/subscribe dialogue:

If you already have a Google account, sign in. If you don't, simply use the Create an account now link to create one. Now you are ready to start mashing!

Step Two: Subscribe to a feed

You can't create a mashup without having some content to mash. So you need to track down some good RSS feeds (or similar resources) that will be of use to your end-users, subscribe to them via Google Reader, then create a mashup for your end-users. The number of resources that you include in your mashup is up to you and will depend on your specific needs. In this example, we will subscribe to three such resources: a targeted Yahoo! News feed, Dragonfly, and the HLA Blogs, each of which is relevant in some way to the topic of health information.

When you first log on to Google Reader, you are taken into the home page, which looks something like this (click to see the image in its full size):

The home page tells you who you are, lists your existing subscriptions on the left, and on the right it shows you the most recent items that have been added to your feeds.

To add a Yahoo! News feed to my Google Reader subscriptions, first I need to generate the Yahoo! News feed that is of interest to me. Open Yahoo! News. Use the Search: box near the top of the screen to type in an appropriate search string, then use the drop list to the right of the search box to select Yahoo! News Only. Click the Search button and a listing of relevant news items will be retrieved for you:

If you are happy with the content of the news items that you have retrieved, and you feel that it would be useful to your end-users to have access to a constantly updated version of this search, simply right-click on the RSS icon that appears on the right of the Yahoo! News items, then select Copy Shortcut. This will copy the news feed's URL for you:

Next, go back into Google Reader and click the link that reads Add subscription:

In the little dialogue that opens, right-click and select Paste, which will paste in the URL for the news feed:

Then click the Add button and wait a few moments while Google Reader adds the feed to your list of subscriptions:

Step Three: Subscribe to more feeds

That's how easy it is to use Google Reader to subscribe to a feed. Now add some more subscriptions. Read on ...