Week 4 #9 Finding Feeds

I've been doing several exercises of the iHCPL but I haven't done a very good job of posting my experience on the blog. Now that we're getting to crunch time for the iHCPL experience, I'll be doing my best to post each exercise.

Back in October, I began exploring the wonders of feeds (i.e. news, blogs, etc.). I obtained a Bloglines account and I tested out several news and blog feeds. I like feeds from the BBC and I enjoy blog posts from local news outlets in Houston and my hometown of New Orleans. I've always considered myself a news junkie (I usually watch at least three different local news programs on the various stations each day), but I have to admit that even I can only take so much of the material that comes across these feeds. Perhaps I haven't mastered how to specify what I want to see, but the amount of content can be overwhelming and most of it seems to be only snippets of information.

I found a lot of variety in the news feeds I subscribed to through Bloglines. I subscribed to news, music, librarianship, popular culture, etc. feeds. I usually read just a few postings on these feeds. Of the additional tools to find feeds, I think Topix seemed the easiest for me to use. It looked a lot like the beginning of any news site's webpage. I found Syndic8 to be the most difficult for me because it has so much graphical content that it kind of hit me in the face just as I tried to look at it. It is in a directory style and probably used more by folks who know about stats and know how to use the format better. I also found Technorati to be a bit difficult for me to navigate. It has a lot of information to sort out.

The news junkie in me finds it interesting to learn about all these up-to-the-minute feeds, but the librarian in me realizes that many of these feeds need to be checked out to see about their accuracy. Sometimes it is better to wait and find out more about a topic rather than get the latest feed that will only be changed in a few hours.