Lurkers, Listserv and RSS

[Alvin Hutchinson]

I have begun to wonder whether the listserv as a medium will change to be
formatted as RSS/XML. One of the best things about RSS news feeds is that
one no longer has to receive e-mail alerts from news services to keep
abreast of a particular topic, etc. One of the primary complaints of my
co-librarians is that they get too much e-mail. Part of it is the listservs
that we ambitiously subscribe to but even when received in digest format, we
often don't have time to read. 

I imagine that the listserv would begin to resemble a blog where the
contributions are not e-mailed to a server but entered into a web form by
users using some form of authentication. They would then be formatted into
XML and readable by an RSS reader for lurkers like me.  If this format was
adopted it would permit subscribers to opt out of the e-mail messages and
just check via their RSS feed reader. I know that some e-mail distribution
lists (one-way listservs) have begun posting content as XML for RSS users.
But could it be done for a multiple-user/contributor list?

I know that recently many of you said that you prefer e-mail notification,
etc. but I wonder if anyone else has thought that something like this is
workable. 
Anyway . . . just a thought. I'll go back in the corner now.



Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2005 15:36:45 -0600
From: "Sloan, Bernie" <bernies at uillinois.edu>
To: "Multiple recipients of list" <web4lib at webjunction.org>
Subject: Lurkers & Web4Lib
Message-ID:
<B541AA7C7356014BA26BE8A5D72B89AF4FF9D9 at pbmail.ui.uillinois.edu>

. . . . This is just an FYI. Like Bill said, there's nothing wrong with
being a
lurker. And if the posting rate was higher, Web4Lib would probably
collapse under the volume of message traffic. If even only one out of
every ten subscribers posted on the average of one note a day, we'd all
be getting over 300 e-mails a day from Web4Lib!


Alvin Hutchinson
Smithsonian Institution Libraries
National Zoological Park
Washington, DC    20008
hutchinsona at si.edu
202.673.4771