My first taste of RSS Feeds began with a wish on how to find good content without getting RSS indigestion from slogging through a lot of junk. It is like wishing to find a Whole Foods salad bar when you are in a food court filled with McDonald's and Dunkin Donuts.
In the comments section, David Geilhulfe and Ruby Sinreich suggested a social networking approach to RSS by checking out their blogline subscriptions. So I went out to the blogsphere with my link basket and picked up a small tasty collection of bloglines subscriptions or blogroll links from some NPtechers and Edtechers (see linklist "RSS Feeds I'm Eating ..." on the lower left side.) I haven't needed to drink any pink stuff . . . yet ... as I struggle to not only master using the tool efficiently but make meaning out of the randomn, misc., and messy information I'm aggregating. The latter is a shift and at first it doesn't feel comfortable. I'm not weird, I noticed it yesterday when I was teaching some of the lab volunteers at a ctc to use delicious.
Recently, a couple of NPTECHers who have been doing this RSS/blogging/tagging thing for a long time, Marnie Webb and Sonny Cloward, have not only shared their preference for tools, but their reading and workflow habits. Probably an important piece to include in any training that one might do to initiate other nonprofits mortals to add their s to the new structure of the web.
And, of course, if we are training less technically saavy users (like me) to use some tools that are not very intuitive, we need good how-to instructions. Or do we need to wait until the tools improve their interfaces? Having spent the better part of yesterday creating simple step-by-step instructions for delicious for people who work in a community tech center, I was delighted to find Anne Davis's post below:
More on Bloglines Using Bloglines (or How to keep up with dozens of blogs everyday) is a great post from betterdays. I like the post and the blog. The post is a great tutorial on Bloglines. The tutorial shows you how to sign up and subscribe to blogs with Bloglines but doesn't stop there. It also shows you some other interesting things you can do with Bloglines. Here's the outline: Signing up Subscribing to feeds Subscribing to feeds - even easier method Bloglines as your research assistant Bloglines and Flickr - Subscribing to people's Flickr photo albums Subscribing to a Flickr tag Subscribing to news sites Subscribing to podcasts The Bloglines bookmarklet Yahoo! Groups Now the 63 responses to this post which provide even more tips and responses really adds to the original post.
Other tutorials, tips, and even competitors like Rojo and Kinja are mentioned. Hats off to Preetam Rai, the author of the betterdays blog for providing this outstanding tutorial. The author also mentioned how some blogs also offer feeds for the comments.
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