I set up a Bloglines account and subscribed to several feeds, including the following: NYT Book Review, Wired Top Stories and several feeds from School Library Journal. I also created a blogroll of the nine of us GCS librarians/media specialists who are participating in this Web 2.0 summer learning endeavor. I even made my Bloglines page public. Here is the address: http://www.bloglines.com/blog/sher51
I can definitely see the usefulness of RSS for tracking news and info updates, especially for those individuals who need to cover a lot of area in terms of maintaining currency for their work and information needs.
It takes a real commitment of time and mental energy to sift through all the information required to learn about and fully utilize a new Web 2.0 tool. I believe that I need to intentionally work with RSS more before stating a final opinion about it. For now, I do not think that I will naturally prioritize use of my Bloglines account over accessing the actual site(s) I have in mind at the moment of need.
At this preliminary point in my learning about RSS, I see it is an application that extends well beyond the concept of bookmarking by providing up-to-the-minute text shortcuts (headlines, summaries) and access to full articles of information within a controlled format. The available search tools function well to provide access to specified topics of interest. Of course, the user can independently browse the web and note if a particular site provides a feed.
One more point of interest: A Georgia middle school media center blog that incorporates individual blogs for the school's administrators and teachers. That is impressive. With no criticism intended, we are still encouraging our teachers to create and maintain their teacher web pages. In all sincerity, technology use, for a number of teachers, is still a rather intimidating proposition.
I hope the information, as I understand it, makes sense to the reader. At the moment, I feel myself laboring under the influence of information overload!
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Hey Sheryl, As always you have done a great job summarizing the utility of this tool. I also felt that the process of setting up the bloglines - sorting through several blogs to decide what was valuable was a sort of information overload in itself. But I am really enjoying the utility of just checking my bloglines page to see if anything new has been posted! That's how I got to you so quickly.
I hear what you are saying about teachers; however I find most of the web 2.0 tools less cumbersome than creating and maintaining a web page.
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