I gave a new presentation on RSS/Atom feeds today as part of our Library Lunch & Learn series. I had about ten people there, mostly College staff, with a few library folks and students thrown in. None of them were using feeds coming in–some had first heard about them from my announcement on the campus listservs–but by the end, almost all of them said that they planned to continue to use their Bloglines account that we’d set up.

I find that, for myself, a lot of web applications take a while to click. I didn’t really get into using feeds until I started wanting to read dozens of library weblogs. Before that, I’d just open BoingBoing and Slashdot and the few other blogs that I read regularly in tabs, and that was good enough for me. And with Flickr, I must have had an account set up for a year before I uploaded any photos at all. Now I find new reasons to love Flickr every day: the photo of some librarians on Halloween that popped up at the top of my tag=”colorado” search during the Lunch & Learn, or the slideshow of the most interesting photos of whales that kept my son busy this evening while I cleaned up our dinner dishes.

My point being that many of the folks in the little class today might not have 100 subscriptions in their Bloglines account by tomorrow. But a year from now, I bet that several have made it a daily habit.