reading – NetworkEd UBC

firehose sipping – managing your rss feeds

Like we said a few weeks ago, RSS is a great tool for keeping up with frequently updated information sources. If you followed our NetworkEducation you even set up a Google Reader account. The problem with RSS is the absolute flood of information you can open yourself up to.

If you follow 50 blogs that post weekly, that’s 50 posts each week, so fewer than 10 a day. That’s not too hard to keep on top of. You can easily manage to read all of those posts, even if you don’t check your reader every day. But if you’ve got a site like CBC.ca in there updating you with dozens of the day’s headlines that can add up to piles and piles of posts, taunting you with their unread status.

There are a couple of good habits to develop as you become a heavier RSS user that’ll save your sanity.

Linkblogging = Pointing at Awesome

So you’ve found something awesome on the internet. Maybe it’s a comic or a LOLcat or an article that completely supports your side of a recent argument about the economic foundations of Prussia. Great. How are you going to tell people about it?

You’ve got a lot of options in the current digital environment. You could email your friends, you can put it on your Facebook (under sharing Links, it’s on the lefthand side of the page), or you can make a linkblog and share it with the world.

Linkblogs are a bit different than regular blogs. While a blog can be a platform for you to write and express yourself, a linkblog is more like a pointer to cool stuff you didn’t make. The benefits of this kind of thing should be easy to see: it isn’t as hard to point people at something cool as it is to create something cool yourself. Remember our post about RSS readers, and how we called them news aggregators? Well, a linkblog is kind of like an attention aggregator. You’re pointing out things you think someone else should pay attention to. The more people who do it, the more will be infected with whichever your favourite meme is.