Firstly, I must confess to being absolutely insatiable when it comes to soaking up information; I can never spare enough time to find and absorb all the information I want. A major part of my misery is that I am interested in dozens, if not hundreds of topics, from cars (of course) to new technologies, from politics to economics, from marketing to trivia and comedy, from real estate to second-hand bargains. As an example of my info-addiction my list of Bookmarks in Chrome is over 300 web sites in 45 categories.
RSS feeds have been part of my info-diet for some time but my subscriptions are liable to change frequently and, as mentioned, some browsers handle RSS better than others. The Web 2.0 Training however led to the discovery that Google Reader is usable here at work, despite us being behind a notably fierce firewall. It's a bit curious, really, Google Reader will work but not Gmail. Don't get me wrong, though, I am not complaining.
As this assignment supposed to be a new thing I fired up Google Reader using the new Google ID I created, as opposed to my personal emails. Some time after firing up Reader, but before i subscribed to any specific feeds, I noticed an excellent, wide-ranging, nicely eclectic list of news items that I thoroughly enjoyed. As soon as I subscribed to a feed this pre-existing list disappeared, which made me a little sad.
I added my feeds (I've had the Unshelved one on my personal readers for years), including Autoblog and a couple of others but kept feeling disappointed that I had lost that original list.
After some time i thought I would try and work out precisely what that feed had been. I have to shamefully admit it took me some time but, eventually, I noticed two headings on the left - 'Recommended items' and 'Recommended sources'. It turned out that 'Recommended items' was that first list I had seen.
Over the last week, 'Recommended item's' has become one of my favourite sources, not least because it covers a broad range. Today it included a story that so intrigued me I added two new feeds because of it: KnowTheNetwork.com and LouiseGray.com. Both of these sites have some great insight into Web2.0 technologies and the article, 'Finding relevance with RSS' ,about Twitter, RSS and relevance, really appealed to me.
Oooh thanks for pointing out the recommended items section - I hadn't paid it much attention before.
ReplyDeleteLike you, I have many varied interests and I often get too enthusiastic and sign up all of these newsletter that I have no hope of reading. Every now and then I resign myself to the inevitable and remove anything unread from my subscriptions :)