Thing #8--RSS Feeds

Okay, since I've previously posted on my love for Bloglines, for Thing 8, I'll talk a little bit about how Bloglines helps me as a librarian. One of the things I use Bloglines for is to subscribe to sites that help with RA/collection development. Some of them are "professional" and geared specifically toward libraries and librarians (like Early Word: The Publisher/Librarian Connection) and some are just ordinary people who post reviews and comments on the books they read (Citizen Reader). These give me a chance to explore books and media I might not come across regularly. And reading the posts of someone who loves, say, Regency Romances, keeps me up to date in a genre that I don't read a whole lot of myself, making it easier to do RA.

I'd also like to point out that if you are a children's librarian or a teen librarian, there are a host of people out there blogging their ideas for children's and teens' programming. Plug them all into Bloglines, and you have a wonderful programming resource.

Technology Blog--Bloglines!

My personal favorite bit of technology right now is Bloglines. I love it. Before I knew about Bloglines, I had all the blogs I read saved to my favorites list on my laptop, but that didn't really help me if I was trying to read them somewhere else. While I'm probably not exercising my memory as much now, since I don't have to recall the web addresses of several different blogs, I do love the fact I can just input a blog address into Bloglines, and it will keep track of it. Bloglines allows me to access the blogs I'm interested in all from one address (www.bloglines.com), and allows me to see right off the bat which blogs have new posts. The one problem I've had is that on a couple of blogs I've added, it only shows the first few lines of the blog post, and you have to click on it to read the rest. For most blogs, though, the entire entry is available on the Bloglines page.

I've been using Bloglines for about a year now, and I'm up to 47 (!) blogs. I could have never kept up with 47 blogs before! (Honestly, I can't keep up with them now, since I only check it twice a week, but the nice thing about Bloglines is it holds up to 200 posts new, so you can always go back and catch up.)