Evaluation of Protopage

PROTOPAGE

LIS6080 GROUP PROJECT

EVALUATION

By Linda Streeter

 My role in our project was to evaluate Protopage. 

First, let me say, that before this project, I had never used a RSS Feed reader and I have never blogged. In short, I was a novice going into the project. 

The idea of trying to learn how to use a program in such a short period of time was daunting.  However, I was able to jump in and create a page with very little difficulty. My skepticism as to how this product would beneficial to me in particular but also to librarians in general was dominating my thoughts going in but I soon found I was premature in ruling Protopage out.

With a glass of wine in hand and a positive attitude (probably because of the wine), I set down to Protopage and after a day of creating my page and playing with it. I can now see its relevance. 

Creating a page in Protopage is very simple.  You don’t have to be tech savy to create a personalized page to suit your needs. When you sign on for the first time you will see an auto-populated page of some many things that it might seem a bit confusing.  With just a click of your mouse, you can clean up the page by deleting any of the many widgets that you do not want. From there it is easy creating bookmarks and widgets for the feeds that are of interest to you.  Everything is menu driven which takes a lot of the guess work out of creating a page. 

I am a news junky, so I created a page titled “HEADLINES” and assembled feeds from papers and television stations in Florida, Maryland and Michigan.  I threw in a few national networks as well.  Protopage is hard not to like.  I only ran into a few problems trying to attach feeds from a few of my sources.  If you attach a feed from Protopage’s list of sources you will have no problems. However, when you try to go outside of their list and create feeds on your own, a little tweeking might be necessary. Nothing major, you just have to play with the URLs until you get the right address for Protopage to read. On all of the sources I had to get on my own, Protopage was not listed as a “share source” in their acceptable shareware.  With the Pensacola News Journal I had to use GMAIL to share the feed, then from there link the feed to my page in Protopage. Other than that, I find Protopage useful in the sense that I can now click on my page and “at a glance” see what is happening in my geographic areas of interest. This could be beneficial to the reference librarian during major news event. He/she could set up a page of worldwide news feeds and see at a glance the latest on what is happening.  I think Protopage is worth looking into.  However, I think there are others out there that are more widely used and recognized by more.