Thing 3 - RSS feeds

I signed up for Google Reader on advice from a friend since we already had to sign up for a Google account. No point in adding to the myriad of accounts, logins and passwords. Overall I think RSS feeds are really cool. At first I was thinking this would be just one more thing to check besides my email. It does have advantages, though, like separating these things out from your regular email. Once you find some interesting blogs it's great to get the new posts as they are published. The main problem is that it can get overwhelming very quickly. The news sites are the worst. I signed up for the news package they have and even after deleting a couple of the less interesting sites I seem to be getting hundreds of posts a day. When I continue to use this for real for the library I think the news sites will have to go, or at least I won't try to read them all. This could be a mega time waster if you let it!

I added some other DPL blogs right from the reader and that was pretty easy. I think it's pretty easy to add feeds from anywhere, really. I found some others after coming across different articles and thought it would be interesting to read more from that blog. I added Common Craft because I really liked that video. I couldn't get the CNET video to work. We have so few computers with sound around here, but maybe I could try it out on a different computer. I also added Libodyssey even though he hasn't posted anything new lately, and iLibrarian which has a lot of posts about Library 2.0 with links to other sites. There are some real practical tips about things I still don't know much about yet and some that could be useful to me now if I had the time to read them. I also added the Harry Potter Automatic News Aggregator for fun. It's a site I found last year and had added the feed to the bookmarks toolbar on one of our computers. That's another easy way to keep track of things and you don't even have to sign up for a feed reader. I'm sure I'll find lots more to add in future.