Monday, September 15, 2008

Feed Me: Exploration 4 - RSS Feeds and Feed Readers

I have to admit, I was a little resistant to feed readers. I only have about half a dozen blogs that I check each day, so it doesn't take all that much time to visit each individual site to see if there's anything new.

At least that's what I thought before I tried a feed reader.

I actually tried two: Bloglines and GoogleReader. They're both fairly easy to navigate and I would recommend both to patrons, but if I had to choose, I'd pick GoogleReader. It looks more professional than Bloglines, which looks a little too cartoon-ish for me.

So okay, I admit I like having a list of only the blogs where new information has been posted. I've also found that I've subscribed to more blogs and news sources as a result, knowing that the time I save by not checking out each individual blog/site allows me to read other blogs/sites that might interest me.

If you find that you want to comment, however, you'll have to click to the blog itself (which you can do easily from your reader). No problem. Unsubscribing is also easy. All in all, a painless exercise, which in this world can be a beautiful thing.

1 comment:

Meerkatdon said...

I'm a big fan of RSS feeds. The biggest time savings is when a blog isn't updated for a few days (or weeks, or months...) -- think of all the clicks and wait-for-it-to-loads that you save by not having to check them out individually!