#8: RSS Feeds and News Readers

I set up a Bloglines account, and subscribed to a bunch of sites, all mostly related to libraries and books (LibraryBytes, PLA Blog, Unshelved, Library Stuff, PW, NYT, guardian.co.uk, libraries.net, etc.). I figure that keeping up with current trends and changes in the library world will at least contribute to professional development, and later I can tweak the selection to include other interests and winnow it down to my favorite sites. As I was setting Bloglines up, it all seemed pretty unwieldy and involved a lot of clicking--almost as much trouble as going to the sites directly, though at least here they are all neatly aggregated and accessible from one place. But then, as I was going in and out of the resources, I saw that a tutorial for Bloglines actually recommends using Google Reader instead--which seems to negate the tutorial that follows, but whatever. So I checked out Google Reader and think it might be more intuitive and flexible. I will be switching all my feeds to that.