Week 4, #9 Exercise

I have to say I wasn't impressed with any of the feed finders listed in the exercise. I found them slow to load, clunky, and many times inaccurate. Several times, I found myself directed to fake blogs that were actually advertisements for insurance or marital aids. I didn't find any useful feeds.



As an experiment, I ran the same subject headings through Google with the tag "RSS feed" and VIOLA I found everything I was searching for and more. Proof that Google rules the world (and I have stock in it!). Google recently bought FeedBurner which many people use to drive traffic to their blog, podcast, etc. Within the next few months, I think all the other competitors will whither as Google expands its realm into the RSS feed world.

Great YA Feed

One of the best YA feeds around is here. I subscribe to it on Live Journal and thought I would share it with anyone who is interested.

Week 4, Number 8 Exercise

This was a wonderful exercise! I usually get all my RSS feeds through my Live Journal blog so this was the first time I had used a straight RSS reader.

I loved the search function. I was able to add quite a few new feeds to my list.

It was easy to set up and use, but I still love an integrated, open source system like Live Journal. With Live Journal, you can easily read all your blogs, rss feeds, communities and other things in one place. The format is much easier to read and access.

The only downside to using Live Journal or other Open Source journals for your RSS feeds is that if you go on vacation or don't check your journal for an extended period of time (summer reading!), you can only backtrack for some many pages. I find that if I don't check everything at least weekly, I can't access the feeds or blog posts that I missed.

In the end, I will probably keep my account long after this training is finished because it will make it easier to keep track of feeds when I'm on vacation or too busy to check them.