Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Thing #3. RSS

This was my favorite exercise because it's about making information come to me instead of me having to search for it. It reminded me of the SDI (Selective Dissemination of Information) I did for customers (patrons, then) 26 years ago! But back then, I photocopied the tables of contents of professional journals and sent them through Interdepartmental Mail. Very time-consuming. I like having Bloglines do the work for me. Then I can be a queen and cruise through the headlines, choosing what I wish and deleting the rest.

Okay, technical stuff next. I already had a Bloglines account but it had been six months since I'd checked it. I can now call it an "aggregator account"; how smart is that? I kept "Shifted Librarian," Slate," and a news feed. I unsubscribed to a couple boring things. Again, I felt powerful: "You unworthy RSS feed, begone!" I added three colleagues "23 things" blogs but it was confusing when I would send in a URL and Bloglines would give me three to choose from. Why? It's the same blog. Then it wanted me to set up preferences and I didn't know what to pick so I stayed with the default.

I searched for blogs through Bloglines and sometimes I found good ones by subject and sometimes I got things from 2004. What's up with that? Enough for tonight.

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