Sunday, March 9, 2008

Week #4 Thing #8

I set up my Bloglines account about a year ago and I use it constantly. I like having one place to check to find out if there is new information on the blogs I read. On a personal level, we have had a real problem in Santa Barbara concerning the owner/publisher of our local newspaper. Without going into detail, after subscribing to the paper for 30 some odd years I cancelled my subscription in protest. This left a gaping hole in my connection to my community. I found that many others had done the same thing and three excellent blogs "sprang" up to fill the void. I read them for news about the problem and for local news. It's not quite the same as having a newspaper each morning but it's better than not knowing what's going on.

For my students, I have shown them Bloglines and explained how it works and why it is good to have one place to check your feeds. I even have a former student who has his own blog and it's great to be able to show my students when he makes new posts.

On the negative side, sometimes I feels overwhelmed with all this information. I have had to pare down my feeds a little because I just couldn't get through them all. But I couldn't imagine what it would be like if I had to check all these different blogs--I probably wouldn't do it! Thanks to RSS I at least have a handle on it.

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