Thing #30: More Ways to Use RSS & Delicious

I understand the principle of RSS and how very useful it might be for some people, but I haven't incorporated it into my own life. (Come to think of it, maybe I subconsciously am by using My Yahoo as my personal home page. I continually get updates from various news sources by means of the widgets I've chosen. Not sure if that counts as RSS, but it does follow the same principle.)

Here have been my stumbling blocks: I subscribed to several feeds via Bloglines, but the number of posts got overwhelming. Plus, it meant remembering to go to Bloglines to check them. As it is, I have an established rhythm of checking a few sources regularly, and adding the Bloglines routine felt overwhelming: too much info.

That said, I could subscribe to or just read selected feeds. But I ran into an email problem. My feeds were automatically going to my email inbox at work, and it was way too much of a good thing. My inbox was getting bombarded and filling to capacity. Finally, I turned off that function. Now I can't figure out how to turn it back on in Outlook, though I've followed the directions. (SIGH) Oh well, getting off topic...

I am using my blog's home page, though, to check on updates of a few of my favorite blogs by means of the blogroll. I like how it puts the most recently updated blog at the top and lets you know when it was updated.

Now, delicious I've been using and loving for more than a year. We have a Library account to which we add useful bookmarks that we and our users will find valuable. I also have a personal delicious account. I love being able to find my bookmarks on any computer, and I love how easy it is to add sites by means of the toolbar. I also like how you're able to find the most popular sites for particular tags.

Right now on our Library home page we have a link to our delicious account, where viewers can peruse our sites with most recently added at the top. But what I'd like to do is take advantage of the tagging to use them for subject guides.

Oh -- and I added the Library's delicious links to my blog, with the tag cloud displayed. Pretty cool to see!