Wednesday, September 30, 2009

arrr ess ess

RSS seems like a very useful tool, it sounds perfect for someone like me that goes to lots of different sites every day to read articles. So, this week I subscribed to Bloglines. Thruthfully, I don't think I will be using it too much. I found the interface a bit awkward. I have most of the sites I visit bookmarked in my toolbar, just a click away. For example, one of the sites I visit for general news during the day is NYtimes. I like the way it's set up, it's almost like browsing through a real newspaper. It also allows you to stumble upon things that might not come up if I didn't exactly specify that section in my RSS feed. The Bloglines interface, even though it showed me interesting articles from a number of sites, was not as enjoyably navigated.

After a disappointing experience with Bloglines, I decided to try Google reader. I did like this a bit better, the familiar "g-interface" was a bit easier to navigate. But again, I missed the browsing aspect of going directly to a site.

Even though I did not have the best experience with these two, I think that I will try to use them again. I do sometimes find it hard to keep up with new content on sites and RSS feed organizers like these could probably help me with a bit more effort on my part.

4 comments:

  1. Katie, I feel the same way! I'm a "random" reader, I like to read one article and wander to the next. Having stuff directly sent is nice, but not the whole thing.

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  2. Katie thank you for the post. I thought I was the only one who was having trouble with blogline. I think I finally figured it out. See you tonight.

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  3. hey katie~

    yeah i had some difficulty at first with bloglines too but after navigating a while I guess I started becoming comfortable with it.

    I'm going to try your suggestion and check out google reader.

    thanks for your post!

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  4. It is an interesting observation about "browsing" or liking a newspaper set-up... keep in mind that just b/c you might use a feed reader to know about new posts, there isn't anything wrong with still going to the site to read it and/or read the site - it just might be useful in saving you from going to the site if there is no new content there to browse - hardly a problem with the NY Times though! ;-)

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