Susan Neva commented today, after seeing a graph (What People are Doing) that I shared, that they would like to become more of a collector and wants to learn how to accomplish this task starting with RSS feeds.
I responded (and decided to share here) with a comment.
Week 4 of Work Literacy seems to be when we get into RSS feeds a bit more, but if you want a place to start try Google Reader. It’s quite simple to use and navigate though and a great place to start collecting feeds. They don’t have to be just on the topic you are interested in (ie: elearning) but can be space, news, cooking, it’s endless. Word to the wise, don’t collect too many or you end up not having time to read them all.
I’d start with Tony Karrer’s blog, Brent Schlenker’s, or mine. Tony and Brent have amazing content, but the reason I listed all three is they have great blog lists of others we follow and might be of interest to you. Tony suggested at one session to keep a feed for 30-60 days (I think) and then determine if you are getting much from the content. If it isn’t of much interest to you after that, then clear it away. This way you don’t end up with 1000+ rss posting a day.
Brent has just changed his reader to no feeds at all. If someone has a blog that he is following, he hopes they have now got Twitter Feeds coming from it as well and he relies on the blog headings that come through twitter. Not sure how this is working yet for him, but it’s an interested way to keep up with all the info we share with one another. I use the Twitter Feeds myself through out the day to check those topics that pop up and are intriguing to me at the moment.
Just chiming in to agree on the value of a feedreader. I got started with NetVibes, and still use it.
Tony’s 30 – 60 day suggestion is good. Another suggestion I have is to use the tabbing feature (I’m sure Google reader has one) to cluster feeds. For instance, I have one for science, where I put feeds from neuroscience, popularized-science sites, etc. Another tab is “Not Work,” a sort of catchall for things that don’t fit into the main categories that make up my interests.
I hadn’t until today thought of making a tab for something like the Work/Literacy Ning, with separate feeds for separate sections — a sort of short-term feed collector.
I read this post earlier but haven’t caught up to myself yet. I would still like to use an RSS feed and will come back to refer to these suggestions again, probably next week when the course is on this topic.
Thanks for the help!