Bloglines: Exacerbating My ADD

As if I needed one more online distraction, I’ve gotten hooked on Bloglines, an RSS Feed Reader. (In English - a single webpage that shows when your favorite blogs have been updated.) It’s called an aggregator, but I believe that’s just a typo for “aggravator.”

Right now I’ve got 15 feeds of blogs of professional interest that generate (in aggregate) quite a number of new entries every day:

2 Cents Worth (David Warlick)
Alice in InfoLand’s blog (Alice Yucht)
Bloglines | News
The Committed Sardine Blog (Ian Jukes)
Cool Tools
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
The Ghost of Charlie Hoban
The Google Weblog
Kathy Schrock’s Kaffeeklatsch
MacRumors: Mac News and Rumors
Quotations Weblog
Quotes of the Day
The Shifted Librarian
Spyware Daily
Wired News

Bloglines is a simple tool to use. Paste the URL into the little blank provided and click “subscribe” after it finds the site. Delete the blogs you no longer wish to have listed. I’m afraid my list seems to be growing rather than shrinking, however.

I suppose I am the last person on the planet to know about this, but I recommend it highly to others afflicted with ADD and need something to keep them from getting their real work accomplished. Or to those who want to know more about the kinds information and ways of getting to it that kids are into.

So what blogs am I not reading that I should be?
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3 Comments »
Take a look at:

1. Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed (there is a good RSS guide on his site also).
2. Michael Lorenzen’s The Information Literacy Land of Confusion library instruction, librarianship, information literacy, and search engines.
3. Librarian Way Connections for Librarians web-based Technology and Research Resources
4. Tim Lauer’s Education Technology Principal at Meriwether Lewis Elementary School, Portland OR
5. Phil Bradley’s Blog focus on search engines and searching.

I also subscribe to political blogs and some of feeds from Seattle PI, NYTimes, . Easy to scan for most important / interesting and avoids all the different interfaces on the sites.

My whole list is at

Comment by Robert Eiffert — September 2, 2005 @ 7:27 pm

Yes - bloglines is great. I use it every day to follow my favorite blogs & keep up on other areas of interest. It will soon take over my life and I will never be seen again….. To see my full list of blogs - just go to my pseudo-blog at: http://www.bloglines.com/blog/JacquieHenry/
(I created the blog using bloglines - just as a way to teach myself the process. I don’t have any plans to update it - but it is there if I ever want to…)

But here is the issue that is making me CRAZY. I am SO upset that our content filter blocks it & our tech committe will not unblock it. When I first discovered Bloglines - I immediately fell in love with the power it gave me to follow my favorite blogs. I also fell in love with the ability to save articles for future reference. I wanted to teach the students - especially the seniors before going to college - how to set up folders for all their research projects. That way they can easily drop good articles into the folders as they ran across them. I also like www.savethis.com for saving ANY article I find on the web. So far, our content filter allows Savethis. That could change tomorrow. However, I really wanted to encourage the students to set up rss feeds if they have not already done so. So Bloglines is really necessary. I know that there are downloadable rss feed readers. Alas - our tech committee not only turned down my request to unblock Bloglines, but, because of budget cuts and dying computers, they have put a freeze on downloading ANY software. THIS IS SO FRUSTRATING!!

Comment by Jacquie Henry — September 3, 2005 @ 7:22 pm

Consider these:
Joyce Valenza’s Neverending Search, at http://joycevalenza.edublogs.org/
Michael Stephen’s Tame the Web: Technology & Libraries, at http://www.tametheweb.com/ttwblog/
Christopher Harris’ Infomancy, at http://www.schoolof.info/infomancy/
Fernette and Brock Eide’sNeurolearning blog, at http://eideneurolearningblog.blogspot.com/
Uglcoyote’si Endless Faculty Meeting, at http://wildwilliam.blogspot.com/

and — for a truly honest take on the realities of education: http://www.comics.com/comics/frazz/

Comment by Alice Yucht — September 9, 2005 @ 8:06 pm |