Week 4 Thing 9

I have explored Merlin, signed up for an account and subscribed to their RSS feed. I also continued exploring Bloglines and the different search tools for finding feeds. Bloglines Search tool is very easy to use. I thought Topix was neat because you can search by city and get community news items. Feedsteer was more confusing for me, especially the mention of widgets. Widgets are a real mystery to me. What is a widget? I also found Technorati confusing. I went through the tutorial which seemed fairly stright forward. But when I went to the site it looked different from the tutorial. I need to pay around with it some more. Maybe I'll figure it out. I may have been confused by some of the search tools; but, at least I found out what search tools for finding feeds are out there.

Week4 Thing 8

I have spent a lot of time this week learning about RSS feeds and news readers. Read the discovery resources and now understand exactly what RSS feeds and newsreaders are all about. After reading Bloglines extensive tutorial, I signed up for an account. It was easy to get started with some RSS feeds by subscribing to some of Bloglines Top Picks. I have started noticing the RSS icon on many sites. It is so easy to subscribe to feeds by copying and pasting the URL/link into the subscribe field in Blogline's reader. I have subscribed to 10 or 12 news feeds. This is a real timesaver instead of going to each website. But I find that all of this Web 2.0 technology can be addictive and soon you find that time has gotten away from you.