Feeding on RSS

My experience with RSS feeding and subscribing is a somewhat interesting one. As it may have been noticed, I had some issues using Bloglines and subscribing to RSS feeds while using the Internet Explorer browser. Setting up my Bloglines account was simple and easy, so no problems there. However, when I started searching for feeds to subscribe to, I kept having issues with adding feeds to my account. I tried several different techniques and sites to no avail. I finally decided to try using a different browser (Mozilla Firefox in this case) and was successful within one minute of opening the browser. Why I had problems, I will never know. It could have been me, my computer, or Internet Explorer. At any rate, I divided and conquered.

After creating my Bloglines account, I searched and scanned through numerous school library related blogs to find some that I thought would be interesting and useful to me in the future. There was no sense in adding blogs that I wouldn't look at after this class had ended. I wanted blogs that had good information on books, technology, libraries, and successful librarians.

I liked blogs that had non-novel-like posts. I know I don't have the time to read everything that I want to, so posts that are short, sweet, and to the point are very appealing. Some of the blogs that I perused were somewhat scandalous and superfluous in their content, and I wondered why they had come up in my searches. I did not like these blogs because they seemed unrelated to my query.

I decided to follow Seth Godin's Blog and Learning.Now for PBS Teachers. Seth Godin's Blog is a non-librarian blog about technologies and other musings by Seth Godin. It seemed to be an interesting blog, so I hope that there will be good technology-based things to learn from Seth Godin. Learning.Now is a very impressive site. Its focus is to help teachers and educators (librarians) integrate the Internet into education and the classroom. I really liked this blog because it is divided into grade levels, so lesson plans and suggestions are created based on the age group of students. I think this site has the potential to give me good ideas about teaching children about the Internet in a positive way.

Technorati: A Blogger's Guide to Blogs

Technorati seems like a very interesting directory. I had never thought of a directory for blogs, but I guess you would need one when the said "blogosphere" is doubling every 5 or 6 months...

It looks like Books (yay!), U.S. and World Politics, Technology, Food, and Religion are well-represented categories in the blog world. There are at least 2000 blogs listed for each of these subjects. Some subjects that are lacking representation on Technorati are Tennis and Hockey in the Sports section and Pets in the Living section. Some subjects that aren't even listed include LIBRARIES......, education, collectors (of antiques, coins, stamps, rocks, etc.), biking, operas and plays, and so on.

When searching for blogs or blog posts, you get different results almost every timeyou search for something. When searching your topic of interest by posts, Technorati displays blog posts that are related to your topic. On the other hand, when you search for blogs about your topic of interest, a list of blogs is shown that is similar to your topic entry.

I think that Technorati is a good directory to have on hand. It is a great way to look up blogs that contain information and/or experiences of someone who is interested in the same things as you are. The only disadvantage that is apparent to me is that not all blogs are contained in this directory. However, this should be the case; people should be entitled to private blogging if they want it.