Saturday, June 28, 2008

Thing #8, RSS Feeds

I have heard several people talk about RSS feeds and how useful they are. It seemed to me that this was just another way to add way too much information to my inbox when it takes enough time just getting through email every day. For Thing #8, I subscribed to some feeds including the following subjects: cartoons, politics, my hometown newspaper, news, graphic novels, and School Library Journal. I used Google Reader since I had set up an account last year, but had seldom used it.
I have learned that some feeds can be slightly overwhelming, like the news sites, but that other sites don't update as frequently or as much as the news sites and can be used without fear of hundreds of new items popping up every hour. And the information is from sites that I am interested in. There are a lot of sites that can be useful to teachers and students (I am currently following the Phoenix Mars Lander) who are studying specific subjects or current events and I will mention RSS to several teachers at school. It was interesting to see some Feed Directories as well learning how simple it is to add feeds from the Google Reader page.
After experimenting with RSS feeds, I believe I will continue to use this service. Google Reader is easy to set up, and can be managed without investing too much time. And I do like the fact that information on subjects that I am interested in can come to me rather than me having to search for it every day.

2 comments:

Katie said...

Robert,
Just read an interesting article in SLJ (May, 2008)by Joyce Valenza and Doug Johnson about some Web 2.0 features.
About RSS feeds they say "Practice the 'one in, one out' theory. Keep the number os blogs you're reading manageable by always deleting an old feed whenever you add a new one."

Seems like good advise to me.

Katie

robert said...

I like that idea. In fact I am going to delete some now.

Robert