Bloglines

This is a cool extension of the presentation I did last semester on podcasting. At that time, my understanding of RSS feeds and how to subscribe to them was still pretty rudimentary. This week I've definitely furthered that education. I didn't find it hard at all to use Bloglines. I hope that doesn't mean I didn't do it right. All I know is, now I have a list of feeds in my name, and when I click on them they open up. When I created my Bloglines account, the very first page explained that all I had to do was add "Sub with Bloglines" into my favorites list and use that whenever I was in a page I wanted to subscribe to. So that's what I did, and it worked like a charm. I added a news feed, a couple book review feeds, of course the Learning 2.0 blog, my own Flickr account (mainly because I'm still angry with Flickr from that particular week and I hate it intensely to this day).

Then I began looking around for other cool blogs. As I searched for feeds to which to subscribe, I found myself enjoying exploring, as it's so rewarding to meander one's way through various crossroads and turning points and find cool things you never knew about before. As Anne suggested, I subscribed to Point of Reference, which seems like a great resource in an area where there is such constant change. I'm happy to have a place to help me wade through all the different choices, especially since I'm not naturally drawn to reference sources and I sort of speak it with an accent.

Then I happened to talk to Michelle on the phone, and she reminded me of a blog Emilee had enjoyed called Kiss the Book. So I went to that, and since it looked awesome, I also subscribed to that. I did feel that that particular blog dealt mainly with picture books and other elementary-level fiction, which isn't my primary area of interest. So then I decided to do a search for other blogs related to young adult fiction and found another neat one by a woman named Jen Robinson. She (and the Kiss the Book lady) both do what I've started doing in my own school blog, which is to review books they've read. I find it helpful to see these kinds of things, because it gives me ideas both of new books to check out, and also ways that I can improve my own little book blog on my UEN page. I wonder if there's an option to add pictures onto mine... As I was looking in Jen Robinson's blog, I saw a link to a NYT debate regarding whether libraries still need books. So I went into that and subscribed to that also, since it looked really interesting.

There wasn't really anything that I disliked about Bloglines. As you know, if you've read my other posts, if I don't like something I will definitely say so, but I had a really positive experience here and I'm excited to keep searching and adding other feeds to my list.