RSS feeds changed my life

I feel very guilty that I am very far behind with my Learning 2.0. Not so much because I am intimidated by the technology, probably more because I am too busy using it.

I have been very very busy at work, and keep meaning to do my 2.0 assignments at home in the evening - but instead find myself uploading photos to flickr, adding links to delicious, reading all the craft blogs I have on bloglines, talking with my friends on facebook etc etc. I'm using it all, but neglecting to make the time to talk about how it relates to libraries.

I love my bloglines account. I started it to keep track of all the interesting library 2.0 blogs out there, but soon clodded it up with craft and design blogs, which send me sweet little capsules of whimsy to inspire and motivate me to get home and start sewing/or clean the house!

When I do use bloglines as a professional development tool, I find that I use it in tandem with delicious, tagging things of interest as they come up, organising them to refer back to later.

This is the thing that I have always found annoying about blogs - the fact that the information is fleeting, a new blog post always comes and then you forget all the great ones that have come before. Using Delicious AND an RSS Feeder has finally given me a way to organise and store all the interesting blog entries I come across. Bloglines has a feature for saving posts as well, but it only lets you save in folders - you can't tag posts - so it's not very useful.

We have created a googlereader feed for Readers Advisory Blogs on the NSW Readers Advisory Blog - which is great. I think that Libraries could use feeds like this on their website to promote their blogs, especially if they have several like Manly!

Hint - don't sign up to a feed on bloglines if you are never going to read it - it will completely clog up your reader and just become a nuisance. Be discerning and only link the feeds that you actually read (or would like to read) daily!