RSS feeds, bloglines, and you (and me too).

Ah, RSS feeds. How useful you are! RSS is not a new thing for me; I already use an RSS reader to collect feeds from both library and game-related blogs. Well, I guess I can't really say that I use it these days, but it still exists. Sometime last year I decided I needed to keep myself updated with library-related news and figured that RSS would make this possible. I went out and subscribed to at least 8 feeds related to libraries! It was great, but at some point I stopped checking my feed regularly, and now there's something like 483 unread items. Nevertheless, if I actually disciplined myself to check it more often, I'd probably find it far more useful. It's great not having to remember to check 8 or 9 of my favorite blogs individually. When I use something like Bloglines, I can have everyone's blogs appear on the same page.

That being said, I was kind of confused that we are using Bloglines for this exercise because Google already has its own RSS reader called Google Reader. This is what I used when I first collected all those library and gaming blogs that I mentioned earlier. Since we all have gmail accounts, we all have access to Google Reader as well. I prefer Google Reader over Bloglines for two reasons:

1. It lets you choose to mark a post as "read" while looking at it on the screen. Bloglines, on the other hand, marks everything new as "read" once you click on the feed you want to read.
2. Google reader displays blog/news postings in the exact order they were posted, regardless of which blog/news site/etc. they belong to. Bloglines divides it into posts by each blog. I prefer the flow of Google Reader here.

That being said, I could be completely wrong about both of these, but I spent about 45 minutes digging through the options and setup pages to no avail. If anyone knows a way to do this, I'd liek to hear about it.

I did use Bloglines to subscribe to all the other staff members' blogs that I've already linked to from this blog. I also subscribed to three library-related news feeds. I created three separate folders so I could categorize things better. I have a "Library-related" folder for the 3 library news feeds, a Wellington folder for the blogs by my co-workers here at my branch, and a PBCLS blog for my fellow bloggers in the library system. Finally, I created a public area which allows anyone else to read the exact same blogs/news that I have in my reader. If you'd like to see it, go here.