Do You Use a Feed Reader?
Prior to 2004, I had a routine for most mornings when I arrived at work. I'd sit down, open up my e-mail, glance at what had come in over night, and then quickly browse through the websites that I got my news from. Larger sites like CNN.com always had new information, but often the smaller sites were updated irregularly. Checking these sites daily was a waste of time, but if I didn't check regularly, I'd forget and miss out on some of the best information and resources.
But somewhere around 2004, I was introduced to Sage, a feed reader that integrates with Mozilla Firefox. It let me bookmark a website's feed, and no longer did I have to go to each individual site. With the click of a couple of buttons, I knew which sites had new content and which didn't. My whole routine changed for the better. I was able to scan content and identify what I wanted to read more quickly. I was also able to add more sites to my list and keep up with content from a wider variety of sources.
At some point in 2008, after some urging by Matthew and participating in an LSNTAP training about feed readers and RSS, I switched over to Google Reader, which has a few more features than Sage and helps me manage my growing list of bookmarked feeds better.
Who else out there uses a feed reader? What made you start?
For those of you who don't use a feed reader, what's stopping you? If it's that
- you don't understand the lingo, check out Huh? RSS? What?, a previous Technola post.
- you don't see why it would be helpful, check out Using RSS Tools to Feed Your Information Needs and More RSS: Using Google Reader for Research and Sharing, both from Idealware.
- you don't know how to set up a feed reader, check out LSNTAP's RSS Walkthrough.
- you don't know what to subscribe to, download and import this file, which includes some of Technola's favorite feeds, into your feed reader. (Hint: Right click and choose Save Link As.) Google has instructions on importing OPML files into Google Reader, and more information about OPML files is available from Idealware.
- you are afraid that you'll get overwhelmed? Remember--you don't have to read it all. - K
I use iGoogle (with a News section containing my Google Reader feeds) as well as Netvibes. There are some inevitable redundancies, but essentially I'm trying to manage my information overload by spreading it out among multiple platforms.
I recently started using Google Reader to keep my subscriptions organized and also because I liked the idea of friends being able to share articles/blog posts/etc.
I've been using Google Reader for about a year now. Recently I also began using Bloglines. I separated my work-related feeds over to Bloglines in an effort to prevent distractions from the person stuff that is still fed to Google Reader.
@Carol and Kevin - Does separating the feeds help?