Exploring Bloglines

Unitil the last week or so, I basically had no dealings with blogs. I've certainly never blogged myself, and though I knew of two or three I would like to keep up with, it just didn't happen. I would forget to check them, or just couldn't find time. I even had a couple that emailed their new posts to me, but that didn't work either. Those posts were buried in emails that needed to be dealt with immediately, and I put them off until later--and usually didn't get back to them.

Well, I'm now officially hooked. I signed up with bloglines and I've added a couple of blogs every day. Just now I added a search to my feeds. What a great idea! Now when someone on a blog posts on this subject, I'll know about that, too. Not only are my new posts all in one place, but I go look at them when that's what I'm ready to do--not when I'm trying to deal with email questions, problems, etc.

For my folder for someone else, I added one for an elderly friend of mine. (She's the reason I asked last week about blogs by and for the elderly.) She's been struggling lately with loneliness, with feeling she has no purpose at this stage in her life. She's always wanted to write her life story because she feels she has a lot of interesting stories and lessons learned to share. But starting a book is just so overwhelming. I want to show her some of these blog posts and see if she's interested in sharing little tidbits this way. If I can get her on board, this would be a great purpose for her--to share and connect with others instantly, instead of spending years trying to write a book. (I would do the posting for her, of course.) I know this is a little off-topic as far as using the technology in libraries, but with the help of the good advice I got last week, I learned so much about locating appropriate blogs, exploring blogrolls, RSS feeds, etc.

As far as using these feeds for our libraries, I think there are lots of possibilities. First, for us librarians--keeping up with the ideas of other libraries. And in looking at other libraries' use of feeds, I was excited to see that many online journals have RSS feeds. I want to find out which of ours have feeds and try to share this info with appropriate faculty members. And another library has feeds to send out updates on their subject guides. (How funny is this--while I was writing this post, my director came in and asked me to add a database to our Education subject guide. Now if we had that RSS feed set up, all our Education folks would know about this right away!)