After the announcement by my lover and tormenter Google about the impending demise of Google Reader, I decided it was time to broaden my distribution channels for the blog since RSS might be in flux for a while. Thus, I have finally started a Twitter account for distributing links to posts here as well as my occasional columns at the Library Journal and possibly other stuff as time goes by. The Twitter page is here: https://twitter.com/acadlibrarian. I’ve tweeted the last few blog posts and columns to get started, and will continue to do so in future. So if you want to follow me there instead of just visiting or relying on RSS, please do so.
Some seem to think Google’s announcement means the end of RSS, although given the panic by so many people after Google’s announcement, I don’t think it’s dying. I just think that Google isn’t making money off it, which isn’t the same thing. Along with everyone else, I’ve been trying to find a replacement. After trying several options, I’ve settled on Newsblur for now. I got the premium account for the librarian-friendly rate of $12/year. The first couple of weeks it was slow dealing with all the new traffic, but it’s sped up after some back end work and is quite responsive now. Google’s announcement was the gentle push I needed to keep steadily diversifying my online life so that I’m not so reliant on one Internet giant. I’m now reliant only Google for only Gmail and Bookmarks, although I fear Bookmarks might go the way of Reader and all the other abandoned Google Projects.
I have a very tightly controlled information gathering system set up with RSS that is high on signal and low on noise because my goal is to get the best relevant information while spending the least possible time. Based on my experience with Facebook, I’m wary of Twitter as an information gathering tool on par with RSS, but if you have any suggestions of library/information professional people to follow who post good professional stuff with a minimum of personal stuff, please let me know and I’ll give them a try.
How are u liking Newsblur? I went with Feedly because it was so highly recommended, and free. I have to admit I haven’t adjusted to the newness of it. It has way more features that Reader did and seems to be about connecting all your social networking accounts. I don’t want that! I just want to collect rss.
I like it okay so far. The first week was sluggish, but the developer did a lot of back end work and it’s faster now. If there are a lot of other features other than the feed reader, I haven’t noticed them intruding, which is good because I also just want a feed reader, not a social network hub. It has a clean interface and various ways of organizing how you view the feeds. I also signed up with Feedly, and particularly like the headline-only feature, but at the moment Feedly is still running off Google Reader with the promise to develop their own API before June. If they do, and it works well, I might switch to that.
Have you tried Diigo for bookmarking? I used to use Delicious but when it got eaten up by yahoo I moved to google bookmarks. Still found it hard to locate things I’d saved, so I moved to Evernote, which is great but really meant for clipping excerpts, not bookmarking! Now I’m with Diigo and happy so far, especially because you can sign up for groups (librarianship, etc) and can actually highlight a page as you’re reading or even leave public annotations for others to see.