Thing 30: More Ways to Use RSS & Delicious

My next library 2.0 topic was on uses for RSS and Delicious.

I've been using my RSS reader (Google Reader) on my iGoogle page to read blog updates. I like that, because I can easily see when one of the blogs I'm following has a new post; then I can choose to read it or not. It makes for less hopping to a variety of websites but more awareness of what's on them. At the suggestion of Thing 30, I added rssWeather and a government blog. The rssWeather feeds drove me insane! All day long my blog reader was being filled with the latest weather forecasts: "Wednesday night forecast", "Thursday forecast", "Friday night forecast". Every time there was an update, I'd get something added to my list. It obscured all the other websites. So it did give me a taste of why FeedRinse and other blog filtering programs were invented! But it just wasn't useful to me as an RSS feed, so I unsubscribed after a number of days. The government health RSS feed is okay; I'll keep it for now. I do look at my RSS reader every time I go on my computer now.

I can't claim to have really gotten my feeds organized. I think I need to find a couple of feeds that would just have an occasional topic I'd want to follow. I don't want to sort out the topics on the blogs I follow currently; I want to know about everything they write about, even if I don't read the whole post.

I am new to Delicious, since I didn't do 23 Things on a Stick. So simply having my bookmarks on it is new to me. I have searched for some topics on it. I have added a couple of people to my network who had More Things on a Stick items.

I did have one really fun moment with that. I've started to follow the blog of a More Things on a Stick participant who was highlighted in the newsletter; her blog is well-done. So then I added her to my Delicious network and looked at her tag cloud. What do you know? She has a health topic on it that I am very interested in and have in my cloud, as well. So I followed one of her links, and it led to some people that I've gotten to know online that have nothing to do with libraries or this project. It was a real "small-world" moment. So I sent her a link on Delicious I though she might like; I don't know if she's seen it.

I added my tag cloud and a badge to my blog. The tag cloud keeps disappearing, though! I tried adding it to my sidebar, but it doesn't fit. The words overlap. So I put it at the bottom of my blog. But half the time it isn't there. I even had to re-paste the code at one point. Has anyone else had problems with it? I have had the opportunity now to explain to a couple of people about what Delicious is. Most people don't seem to be familiar with it.

I would suggest to people who are interested in following more than a couple of blogs to set up an RSS reader. If nothing else, it's a nice alert when there is new content. I would also suggest Delicious to people who use more than one computer or to people who really use the Web for research. It's handy to tuck sites away there that you might not even put in your Favorites on your browser. And you could be a help to other people who are interested in the same topics. It's social networking, but it's much more focused on useful links than your personality.