RSS has given employees and everyone else the ability to easily subscribe to the vast amount of information out on the Web. Now comes the question, what to subscribe to? What is cool? For the business user, the question becomes, what sources, sites and blogs, provide information useful to my business that I can rely on for quality content? BlogBridge Feed Libraries are designed to help companies provide guidance to their employees on where the useful content is located and then make it easy to subscribe to it.

BlogBridge provides Expert Guides to content in a variety of topics on its public site. Access to these sites is free just as the public version of the BlogBridge RSS Reader. It is the RSS reader I use. I have also created three of the expert guides on knowledge management blogs, enterprise 2.0 blogs, and enterprise 2.0 application provider blogs. There are many more useful ones on topics such as wine, entertainment, and many business topics, including much on technology. I subscribe to several of them. You can also take these lists and add you own and delete the ones you do not find helpful.

Now comes the Enterprise 2.0 part. Blogbridge also makes this service available for use within the enterprise. I spoke last week with Pito Salas, CEO at BlogBridge who said, “Here is a crucial point that many people will miss but is critical to understand the BlogBridge Feed Library: it is a piece of software that you can install on your own server, inside your firewall. It’s not the content of the library (the books,) it’s the software to organize the library (the building.).” The Blogbridge Feed Library provides a flexible web based structure to showcase Feeds, Reading Lists and Podcasts to people within the enterprise.

The BlogBridge Feed Libraries can be the ’web content directories’ where users can browse and search for recommendations of content to read with their RSS Aggregators. The experts within your firm can place in the Feed Library the blogs and other sites that they feel will best address the issues that employees face as they deal with the topic cover by the Feed Library. For example, one firm might have Feed Libraries on Marketing, Engineering, Human Resources and Manufacturing. Another might cover Biology, Medicine, Technology, Management, and Research. A bioresearch firm might have different libraries for subsets of Biology. It puts your experts in control of the recommendations for web reading. At the same time individuals can customize it with their own additions for their individual RSS feed lists.

As experts make changes in the recommended feeds, it is easy for users to update their libraries. There is a place for biographical information about librarians and there is a built in announcements blog where you can communicate with your clients. You can also completely change the look of the site to match your organizational web site. The libraries contain thumbnail images of each of the sites. Analytics are provided so you determine the most popular feeds with an automatic top 10 and top 100 listing. It can also be integrated with Google Analytics. The service is available as an on-demand service or you can host within your firewall. It is also available as an open source option for non-commercial users. Since this is an enterprise library, it can include blogs and sites within the enterprise, as well as those on the Web. These Feed Libraries are a useful way to help employees find the information resources they need to support their work and they offer the opportunity to bring the expertise of the firm to help guide their selections.

Below you can see a sample Feed Library. There is a description of the librarian. Within the library there are several sub groups. Clicking on any of the orange bars such as the first one, labled aviation accidents, reveals more feeds.