Last Friday, I got the long-awaited word from one of our hard-working web people: the RSS feed for Computer Media and Computer Book Prepub Alert was ready. Not an hour after blasting out the good news on two listservs—this was something that my writer, Rachel Singer Gordon, and I have wanted done for years and that was requested by the vast majority of librarians who were informed about both columns’ online-only presence—I got a few good kicks in my editorial teeth.

As it turns out, dear readers, all RSS feeds are not created equal. Much as I insist on New York Super Fudge Chunk when eating Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, people crave a certain kind of feed. The one that LJ uses for my computer columns are designed to draw traffic to the website, so RSS subscribers will not see the full text of the reviews or annotations; they merely get the link for the time being.

On the whole, this doesn’t sit well with librarians who, while they respect LJ’s position as a golden oldie of a print magazine with a mandate to develop online content, point out that time is of the essence; they need some additional clues about the content. As one respondent genially put it, “[m]any people expect RSS feeds to function as more than just an annoucement of new content… It would be great if you could add a headline…or a snippet of text so that folks can decide if they’d like to click the link.”

I would like to thank everyone for their feedback on Computer Media’s migration and the launch of Computer Book Prepub Alert. To be frank, I don’t know what I’m doing—I’m a Gen Xer who couldn’t care less about owning an iPod—but I do it well by picking the brains of my audience and the very learned Rachel Singer Gordon and Laura Ciporen (our Online Project Manager). Web reviews are a strange beast, but I am convinced of their usefulness and relevance. For more on this contentious topic, don’t miss Francine Fialkoff’s upcoming editorial in the Nov. 15th issue, “Online-Only Reviews.”