RSS Revelations

Being an indiekid at university was hard. Frank Zappa once complained that while people in the USA go to gigs to watch the band, in the UK people go to gigs to watch each other*. To succeed in indie circles at university meant more than being into alternative music; it should be music that only you and a handful of people know and better if no one knows at all, especially if it's a demo tape, preferably before members of the band had met, or had even left the womb.

Imagine how hard it must be for an indiekid in this day and age, where anyone can go on line and search for early Belle and Sebastian EPs - even worse now that Spotify can allow people to listen for free and will also give them recommendations on top. Not that many people ever did - ability and incentive are different things - but I suspect it was this fear of depleted exclusivity rather than a social instinct that drove indiekids onto blogs. Keeping on top of lots of music blogs is hard work and thus the RSS feed was a godsend but an RSS feed stuck in your favourites doesn't let you know when new posts appear; for that you need a Reader.

I was slow to Readers and often leave mine unread so that when I log on again I have hundreds to browse. However I did not realise that they were such a powerful tool. For a while now I've had three folders: Español, following blogs on newspapers; Library, following some LIS blogs; and Music. I now have a 23things folder, which keeps an eye on all you folk.

I find it annoying that once you have hovered over a post it just vanishes from the feed meaning that I make liberal use of "keep as unread" and the star system to return to posts later. I also find it very hard to keep track of comments on posts. Finally I find that I don't read them very deeply, especially if I follow a prolific blogger. I wonder if it is just me.

I did not know about the cool extra thing and I have been playing with this over the last few days. I now have a few EBSCO feeds, google searches, and I am trying to sort out Zetoc feeds . One great thing I have discovered is how to get RSS feeds of pages that do not have RSS feeds. First you need to go to here and paste in your url, then you can put the output into your Reader. I have combined this with a site search; my, previously mentioned, favourite author Enrique Vila Matas writes occasionally in El País so I now have a feed of that search, which will also tell me when he is mentioned in articles.

All in all, a very instructive week.

*
I heard this on a recording of a talk he gave to some American music students, which I found on a Captain Beefheart internet archive years ago and unfortunately I cannot find the url to cite my reference.