What is a RSS Reader?
As I am writing this blog with the beginning blogger in mind, I will be posting about RSS readers today. A RSS reader enables the reader to keep check on as many blogs as the reader desires. As I have mentioned in the sidebar, I personally use Pageflakes. My pageflakes url is http://www.pageflakes.com/kberman33063/198284.
When you look at my Pageflakes page, you will see 2 topics:news and social network. I really have 21 topics of blogs I read which only I can access on Pageflakes: news, social network, community, daily blogs, about blogs, ideas page, WordPress, consultants, change, writing, weight loss, faith, cooking, mental health, web design, Florida blogs, forums, and Ning sites. For each topic, I have 5-10 blogs chosen for each topic. My topics pages can be moved and changed and they often are. So what you see today may be different tomorrow. They change as I change and evolve.
These blogs generally change daily throughout the work week. Weekends are generally slower. Do I read from every topic every day? No way. At the present time, I am working on 8 of my blogs from my blog empire. So I will read from those topics as I’m working on a topic.
For more information than the blogs I’ve chosen, I next research a topic idea from searching everyone’s bookmarks in Delicious. Delicious is a tool I use daily and currently have saved 1988 bookmarks in 580 topics and they are here. I use my bookmarks for my basic information and go deeper into a topic by searching others’ bookmarks.
I don’t use Google for much except general research. Also I always add 2008 to my Google search for whatever topic I am researching so that I don’t read 5 year old posts. Most of my information I write about is current and as up-to-date as I can make it.
Many of the tech writers use Google Reader. I don’t like it because I like my reader to look like a magazine with some pictures. It breaks up the words for me. The page view from Reader is one I used awhile ago. To choose your own blogs if you like Reader, sign up with Reader and follow the directions.
Some extra reading for you (chosen from Delicious search of RSS readers:
(1) The State of Online Feed Readers
(2) The Ultimate RSS Toolbox- 120+ RSS Resources
(3) Seven Tips for Making the Most of Your RSS Reader
(4) I used Bloglines before I found Pageflakes. Bloglines and Google Reader are probably the 2 most popular readers.
(5) Marshall Kirkpatrick–Screen Shots: How I Use RSS to Track Thousands of News Sources Easily.
(6) ConverStations Mini-Lessons: Google Reader: Covers how and why to get started with Google Reader.
