Week 4, Thing 8: I hate Bloglines

I'm kinda surprised that as the MDLibrariesLearning project decided to use Bloglines instead of Google Reader. Everyone already had to have a Google account to set up blogs in Blogger, and it would work for Google Reader too. I hate that when you click on a feed in Bloglines to read it, all of them are immediately marked as read. What if you don't have time to read all the posts immediately? You have to go through and mark each one "Not read" one at a time. And so far I have found no way to change this setting. How ridiculous. I get feeds from eBay and Craigslist every day in my Google Reader--I may have 100 posts or more for those feeds in the morning, and there's no way I could scan them all at once. Anyway, you can see my blogroll to the right, and it will change as I add more blogs. I have a number of participant blogs already, Stephen Abrams' blog, and of course, two library comics.

However, I LOVE RSS. Love it. Love it. Love Google Reader. I have 75 feeds in my Google Reader, including all my library blogs, different comics and Cute Overload (also several lolcat RSS feeds), the library staff blog, customized eBay and Craigslist feeds, several Washington Post blogs, and dressage blogs so I can get my horse fix. I'd love to add more, except that's really my limit for reading. I like pretty in-depth feeds.

I definitely want my library to offer RSS feeds for different things--blogs for library news, technology training, children's programs; customizable feeds from the library catalog for notification of new things added to the collection; maybe a podcast or videocast to take advantage of the draw of visual media. It's a great technology--both for getting generalized info out to many people without getting caught in spam filters, and for creating specialized information streams without giving out any personal information (such as with eBay and Craigslist feeds).