Teaching RSS Feeds

I recently had an opportunity to teach the public how to use RSS feeds for real-time research at the San Francisco Public Library. While our training computer center could only accommodate about 30 attendees, I was surprised (and gratified) to have received nearly double that amount of people. Apparently, there is high interest in new search technologies emerging on the Web. People may not be familiar with the lingo, but they have probably encountered some of these new Web 2.0 applications on the Web. I was able to introduce several news search engines, news sites, and news blogs, demonstrating how many of these resources already have RSS feeds built into their Web sites. The workshop lasted only an hour, but it certainly drew to my attention that people are continually relying on the Web for their daily information needs.