23 Things: New Books RSS Feed

One service I offer on my other blog, Forced Migration Current Awareness, is announcements about "New Books" on refugees, forced migration, internal displacement, and the humanitarian sector. In the past I have created custom RSS feeds using the Amazon Feed Generator. Basically, this allows you to enter keywords, generate a feed, then receive updates when new books with those matching keywords are added to Amazon's database. For various reasons, though, this has not been an optimal solution.

After being introduced to del.icio.us through SLA's 23 Things program, I thought of a way to supplement my new books service. Basically, whenever I come across notices of new book titles, I bookmark those pages in del.icio.us and tag them as "newbooks." del.icio.us automatically generates RSS feeds for all tags, so I've subscribed to the newbooks feed, and when updates appear in my Google newsreader, I "share" them so that they appear in my "New Books" feature in the sidebar of my blog. This ensures that anything missed in my Amazon feed can still be picked up and highlighted.