Digitalist life in the library

Things 5 & 6 – RSS feeds

• Thing 5: Sign up to Google Reader and subscribe to the RSS feed of the 23 Things blog.
• Thing 6: Find some more feeds to subscribe to.

I honestly do not know how I would survive without RSS feeds. I must have been using them now for around 3 years and in my mind Google Reader is the only way to manage them. At present I have 204 subscriptions - at least half of those are for the blogs of the 23 Things participants, and yes I am reading them all.

I've seen a lot of posts on the 23 Things blogs that show the participants can really see the benefit of getting all the updates from favourite website and blogs in one place but there is an expression of concern about how on earth it's possible to keep up with it all. My advice to you is to organise and prioritise. Organise your subscriptions into folders based on topic to start with and if you're really keen you can then add numbers to set their priority e.g. 1 = must read, 10 = if I don't get around to this it's not the end of the world.

My next tip is to set aside a period of time each day that you will use to catch up on your feeds. I have a quick dip in first thing to zip through those feeds that update multiple times a day (e.g. Mashable and LOLcats) and then take around 30 minutes at lunch to read through the less frequent updaters with a bit more care.

Finally, don't be afraid to use the sacred "Mark all as read" button. Having just returned from a week's holiday I have used this on 6/9 of my folders cutting my unread items from around 400 to nearer 150.