Thing #9

I found the Edublog award winners site the most helpful. I added 2 more librarian blogs to my reader, and found a website that compiles children's literature blogs and other information that looks great- jacketflap.com . The award winner's site was exactly what I needed- just a few options that matched very closely with what I was looking for.

I found Google blog search to be quite unhelpful. It apparently searches keywords in any blog post, and therefore returned vastly more hits than I wanted to slog through, and they were only tangentially related to what I wanted (much like standard Google searching itself :)).

The two feeds I added were Hey Jude and Cathy Nelson's Professional Thoughts, both blogs by librarians on topics of interest to me.

I cannot figure out how the little RSS icons work though. I want my feeds to go to my Google Reader, but when I click on the RSS icons, it tries to put the feed into a folder on my local hard drive. I have just been copying and pasting the URL into Google Reader, which seems to work, but I don't get what I'm supposed to do with the icons.

Thing #8

I have set up Google Reader with 5 feeds. I like the fact that I don't have to go to each web site to read the new stuff, but I don't like the long list of things I now feel obligated to read. I can't even keep up with my email most of the time, and this is just more stuff! I do not currently spend time checking lots of webpages, so this service is adding to my workload, not decreasing it. It also took me a long time to find 5 blogs I thought I might want to read regularly, as I am currently a person who reads zero blogs.

I do like the headline news feeds I have on iGoogle, though, since they allow me to "scan the headlines" and only click if I am interested in details about a certain story. That keeps me somewhat updated and saves me time. I don't really see this being an advantage at work however. The one blog I can see myself checking at work was a library humor blog I found (Love the Liberry). I can frequently use a laugh at work! As far as using RSS feeds with kids or teachers, I can see setting up some of the automatic searches to send you updates on particular topics that a class is discussing. There is so much teachers can do with current events that could be facilitated this way.