Because it's there!

This week's learning assignment is RSS feeds. I seem to have got the hang of it, but again, I can't see it having much use for me. I read about 4-5 blogs on a daily basis, and most of these update fairly infrequently, so RSS feeds aren't much help to me. I worry about the librarian who tells us she follows 80 blogs a day. What would you say to someone who told you she washes her hands 80 times a day? My response: Get. Help.

I don't care who they are: nobody needs to read 80 blogs a day. Even I can easily spend 40 minutes reading my favourite blogs, and though I enjoy it, I always come away with the slightly seedy sense of having wasted time. Just as if I'd been playing a computer game, or...reading Harry Potter.

I came across David Lee King's blog, which is steeped in the 2.0 mantras, but still manages to be interesting. David seems to belong to the 'because it's there' school of thought on Libraries and Web 2.0. Why do librarians need to know about Web 2.0? Because it's there! Pragmatic, functional justifications for particular applications seem to be in short supply. Increasingly, this is my Canute-like critique of the whole Library 2.0 project. The idea seems to be to grab each new thing - wikis, RSS feeds, blogs - and then try to find a reason why libraries need it. It ends up sounding a little desperate.