Serendipity35

Every once and awhile I go to a site like YouTube and do a wildcard search. Enter an asterisk as the wild card in their search box and it looks for ALL videos. A few weeks ago it came up as 79,600,000 videos. (Just now I tried & it and maybe they are disallowing wildcard search; it said "1-20 of millions.") It's overwhelming.

And it's spring cleaning time, so I started going through my RSS feeds for blogs and deciding what to thin out. I have had to do this before. I have been a longtime user of Bloglines, but a few months ago I started adding a few feeds to my Google Reader since I use Gmail, Documents and their calendar (which now syncs with the Outlook calendar on my school office computer) every day. I'm starting to ignore my Bloglines feeds, and if you do that for a few days or weeks, the amount of UNREAD posts is frightening.

(Still not sure about what RSS is all about? Watch this simple and plain English video explanation.)

Using Google Reader means I need to snip away at my existing Bloglines feeds. But what to prune away?

Pruning #1 Right off are the blogs that post multiple short posts each day so that I can't keep up with reading. They must be part of this current interest in Twitter and other microblogs that I just don't get.

Have you tried Twitter? Users post all day with short bursts of "news" updates: "I'm having some soup; heading to a meeting; at the gym; just saw the new Porsche drive by." You can sign up with your mobile number and enter text either via the form on the site, or send text messages to the service. Depending on your privacy settings, the messages will be displayed right on their public page or just on your private page, visible only to you and your friends. I don't need to follow anyone that closely, and no one would want to follow me either.

#2 Then there are a few bloggers who have turned too commercial for me. There are two educators in particular that I have followed for a few years that I just dropped. Reason? Their posts have just become a series of tales about all the conferences and workshops they are doing. And their resource links are the same old wine in new bottles. They work hard at finding new ways to title the same talk on Web 2.0.

#3 If you want to have a blog, you have to blog. There were 7 blogs that haven't had a new post in more than a month. At least they don't pile up, but, alas, farewell.

Is Google Reader better than Bloglines? Each has some small advantages/differences. For Google Reader, for me, having in front of me when I open my Gmail is good. Subscribing and categorizing feeds in folders is equally easy. There are small things that matter (maybe just to me) like: in both I can email someone a blog post but in GR I can select my own subject line (in Bloglines, it creates an uneditable one for me. Choose either (or comment below with your own favorite reader) but if you read blogs on any regular basis, use a reader.