Saturday, October 9, 2010

RSS feeds

I just watched the "RSS in Plain English" video. Something that struck me was said near the end of the video, about being careful, it's addictive. I would have to agree. I have had an account on Google Reader for about a year now, and I look at it about one every couple of weeks. Ok, so maybe I don't fall into the addicted category, but I do know that when I dig into those articles from the RSS feeds of my favorite blogs, I can be a bit overwhelmed with all the information.

Lee LeFever, in his video, talks about the old way, vs the new way of reading news from your favorite sources. When I first started reading blogs, I didn't spend too much time reading them individually, rather I sort of jumped right into Google Reader. So, instead of saving myself time and aggravation tracking down whether or not the blog had added new content, I was spending more time, reading things on my Google Reader. LOL! That being said, I really do like Google Reader, because it brings all of my content together, although you don't really get the flavor of the original blog, since Google Reader really only brings the stories and not the look of the blog. I don't comment on blogs very much, but I've never really learned how to do that with Google Reader. Perhaps something to learn more about. As a side note, I had initially had a Bloglines account for reading feeds. It has features that I don't think Google has, which I really liked, but then something about Bloglines kept giving me problems, so I ditched it as a newsreader.

Oh, and another thing. I generally find the blogs I'm interested in reading through the "Add a Subscription" search box in Google Reader. I haven't really done too much of the going to a specific page and looking for the Add RSS orange box thingie. I tried that with a Chicago Tribune blog for this exercise, and could not find the RSS Feed icon anywhere on the main page, or on a columnist's page. There are options to Like the Chicago Tribune on Facebook, get an iphone app, and share the content through various social media outlets, but I couldn't seem to find the RSS icon. Probably a good thing. Much of the stuff on the Tribune site was pretty disturbing. I'll check out the Daily Herald instead. On to podcasts!!

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