week 4, thing 8: bloglines

I did not have any experience with rss before this exercise. My goodness, what a dream! I like that rss allows you to separate the wheat from the chaff. On news sites, it is possible to skim the headlines of news articles without looking through all the side banners and clicking to separate pages. On blogs, you don't have to get bombarded with all of the pictures and other images that sometimes accompany personal blogs.

I think that of all of the tools I have looked at so far in this program, this is the one I will continue to use.

Several months ago, CNN started pulling out the top details of each of their news stories on their site, so that you could get the main ideas without reading the whole article.

It was easy to locate the different feeds in my bloglines account, the icons help distinguish between different corporate feeds and blogs (blank page icons).

I also liked how if you had been away from your account for a couple of days, you have the option of marking all your items as read. This is even easier than clearing out your email inbox.

http://www.bloglines.com/public/illcommunication
(hopefully that will work and my mastery will be demonstrated)