Make site current without overloading the webmaster

I've recently encountered a couple of cool tools that can help make your site more interactive and current, on a budget, without driving your webmaster insane.

Want to share a reading list with your audience, such as guides for classroom instruction, podcasting, etc.? LibraryThing is yet another social computing tool that lets you catalog books (ones you own or ones you want) online, organize them with tags, and share your reactions with others. It's incredibly easy to add books -- I had been using Amazon's wish list function to keep track of books on my wish list, and LibraryThing imports these! They also have a "bookmarklet" that lets you add any book you find on Amazon to your library list with one click.

Even cooler, they have a "widget" that you can put on any web site featuring random or selected books -- see an example on my RTFM! blog (scroll down, on the right). You could create an organizational account and include "highlighted" among the tags, and then feature that list somewhere on your website. As staff add useful books to the LibraryThing account, you can easily tweak the tags to rotate them into and out of the display.

Relatedly, I found a freeware service -- the RSS Box Viewer -- that lets you easily put an RSS feed on any page. I'm using it on my work homepage to display recent entries in my Educause blog (is this getting recursive enough yet?).

Both of these nicely complement the del.icio.us tagroll -- a great way to share discoveries in online spaces, e.g. journal articles on instructional tech -- as well as tag clouds, which provide an alternative cognitive map of information or interests for site visitors (see examples of both at jsclark.net).

One of the best things about all of these things is that once you set the feeds up, they update automatically. Call 'em textcasts. :-)