Feb 10 2008
Clearing out your Bloglines….
Old habits die hard, but even ones picked up over the last couple of years when it comes to RSS feeds seem to also take a while. So for the past few years all my feeds have been coming down to my bloglines account. The problem is you always seem to keep adding and adding feeds, until reading them all can take at least 30 minutes plus a day.
So I tried to swop over to a client based desktop RSS feed reader – called NetNewsWire. It has just become free to use and download for the Mac. So I thought why not? However after messing around with all the features, setting up the preferences which were shall we say a little complex I am not convinced. The lovely feature that it enables you to download and save the actual page where the feed is on, is undeniably fabulous and much better than the clippings feature within Bloglines. But the program would make no difference in my reading habits I believe and probably might make it worse. Beyond this there is something undeniably flexible and accessible about a web based feed reader.
Maybe the new Bloglines Beta might help, but in the end I just think it is time to prune all of those feeds that I never really read. I don’t think technology this time can improve my reading work flow as much, as the discipline of deleting those feeds from 103 to maybe 53. Any ideas might help, as would any ideas about how to get students involved in using feed readers for their research. I have somehow failed even if showing and discussing the power of these RSS feed readers to get students to use them on a regular basis. It may be due to them seeing how long it takes me to read my feeds?
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