Thing 5 and 6: RSS Feeds

Super busy at work this week so not a lot of time for this.

'Thing 4' was registering my blog which didn't seem worth a post. So here I am with Thing 5: RSS feeds. First thing I learnt was what RSS stands for (unless the 23 Things Blogger was joking). It was indeed 'really simple'. When I logged into Google-Reader for the first time, I found two blogs already there, under 'blogs I'm following'. These were for (art) blogs for which I had, some months ago, selected the GoogleFriendConnect function. 'Following' and 'Subscribing' seem to be essentially the same thing.

I subscribed to the 23 Things blog as suggested. For Thing 6, I also added some more subscriptions: My boss Jacquie Dean's '23 Things' blog, a British Library blog by the Harold Pinter archivist and another sketch blog, Urban Sketchers.

When I explored the settings I discovered, naturally enough, that you can add GoogleReader to your iGoogle page, so I did that. I was also intrigued by the 'share' function, which enables you to share interesting posts via a number of social networking platforms: Twitter, Facebook, etc. I already have 'share on facebook' tool on my personal computer's toolbar, though I just as often cut and paste url's onto my facebook 'wall'.

I can see the potential and usefulness of these technologies for filtering and sharing content, but confess none of it is woven enough into my lifestyle, nor have I a similarly motivated enough community, for them to seem like intuitive and useful enhancements - yet. My practices with online content and sharing are a little more sporadic and ad hoc at present.