Thing 30: More Ways to Use RSS and Delicious

I've been struggling with this Thing, and I think I know why. One of the things I struggle with is sensory overload: too much coming at me at once to make sense. The more that new things come at me, the more I need to step back and go STOP! Let me make sense of this at my own speed! Another thing I struggle with is that I have LOTS of interests (gardening and books and old movies and old television and library stuff and....), and I struggle with "moderating" the flow of my information so that I don't miss things that might interest me.

I have not been using my Bloglines account for RSS feeds, and have been feeling "guilty" for not using it. Going directly to blogs that interest me and reading them "live" on the web works better for me, partly because I feel more in control. I can read it when I want to, and what I've missed, I don't know about. The idea of using keywords to filter RSS feeds is interesting, but what keywords would I choose? The trick with keywords is that there isn't necessarily standardization (none of that subject heading or descriptor stuff.) I should be interested in Delicious, despite my privacy concerns, since I do use things on multiple computers, and it would be nice to have my bookmarks someplace. But I'm just not there yet. I think it would be handy when planning a trip, for example, to have links to sights to see, to plan with your fellow travelers. And you could share links with your colleagues (we used to do that on our reference desk computer, but they kept getting purged by the tech folks.)

When I first finished doing the 23 Things, I tried to set up a schedule of 2.0 activities (schedules are something that work really well with me.) Doing my blog posting on a schedule worked pretty well (I posted most Friday mornings.) I didn't find a workable schedule for the other things I tried to do. Since we don't have regular schedules at my institution (i.e., I don't have a regular schedule that I'm on the reference desk, it's different every day, every week), that makes scheduling other things more challenging.

I guess I just need to make some time in my schedule to play around in these things, so that they work well for me. What works for me seems to be different than what works for most people.