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Tuesday 28 June 2011

Thing 3: Reams of Substance and Subjects or Rhetoric and Surplus Stanzas?

RSS feeds: funnelling the information to you,
but what's the best way to digest it?
Photo from: jews4barack.com

I've been looking forward to this Thing as I was never sure that I'd fully understood RSS feeds and how to use them. Luckily it is Really Simple, Stupid and I feel a lot more confident about how to go about them. In the name of fidelity to the course I had a sneak peek at Google Reader - as with many of the other Google programs it's handy to have under the same umbrella as my beloved Gmail, but yet again it all seems a bit cluttered to me and frankly not as intuitive as other aspects of the Google brand. I may, however, have to give it another chance on a slightly faster browser than the achingly slow Internet Explorer at work and spend a little more time on it.

One other reason that I'm loath to do so, however, is because I can set up RSS feeds incredibly easy on my Netvibes page (see Thing 1 continued) - I've even set up a dedicated tab so I can keep my feeds in one place without them getting all mixed in together as on Google Reader, though admittedly this may only work while I have a relatively small number of feeds. The latest Cambridge Lindy Hopper gossip? At my desktop in a click. Sunday Postsecrets? Here you are madam, no need for all that typing. All the Cam23 updates? On a platter.

And the REAL meaning of RSS (selon moi)? Receiving and Sharing Sources. What a librarian-like tool, don't you think?

2 comments:

  1. Reader will definitely work better on a faster browser/computer. GoogleDocs does, too.

    In Google Reader you can look at your feeds separately by selecting them one at a time from the list on the left (expand the 'subscriptions' option using the little +), and you can also group them together by adding them to folders (using the 'feed settings' option at the top when you've selected a feed, or the 'manage subscriptions' option at the very bottom left).

    Right, unexpected Google lesson over (sorry...).

    K.

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