Week #4 RSS and newsreaders

This is going to be an easy activity for me as I've been using a newsreader for a long time. Back when I started following a lot of blogs, I found it time consuming to visit them each day to see if they had been updated. Since many bloggers only post to their blogs sporadically, I was wasting too much time. A newsreader solved this problem, neatly categorizing my favorite blogs and letting me know when they had been updated.

So, rather than use Google Reader as this week's activity suggest, I'll just share with you the software that I use - SharpReader. It is free and I've been very happy with it.

I did use Google Reader's search function to find some interesting library related blogs to follow. These all look like popular and active blogs. I added them to SharpReader:

http://www.librarystuff.net/

http://theshiftedlibrarian.com/

This last one is just for fun - looks humorous:

http://www.unshelved.com/

I found the Google search tool to be pretty useful. However, many of my feeds have been found simply from links from a related blog. If I find a blog I really like, I always check to see if they have a links page. Technorati seems useful as well. Google seemed to be a little simpler, but both were easy to use.