RSS, blogs, and delicious

RSS, blogs, and delicious are various ways to find information online. I find them useful in different ways. You can find a blog on pretty much any subject.  There a few blogs that I follow regularly or semi-regularly. I find them to be useful for following a particular subject or author I am interested in. For example, I regularly follow  trivia, humor,and political blogs. I see this as similar to reading a favorite newspaper column every day. I have a general idea of what will be covered and the writing style that will be used. I generally don’t search for blogs, but happen upon them through links. Therefore, if i was searching for information, I would probably check blogs I already knew rather than doing a blog search. I have used blog search on a few occasions, but I find it hard to find useful information this way. The results are usually rather haphazard. It is useful for finding out what the public is saying about a particular subject, especially pop-culture subjects.

I was not really at all familiar with RSS or delicious before this assignment. I had some sort of vague idea of what they were, but had never used them before. I found RSS sort of interesting. I can see how it could be convenient to look at all your blogs, news sites, and other information in one place, but that’s not really for me. I like to check my sites directly and have them all open in different tabs. That’s just sort of my surfing style. Maybe in the future, if I continue to use Google Reader, I might get used to it. It could definitely help me in remember to check certain sites.

I find the idea behind delicious to be an interesting one. I like the idea of being able to search sites that other people have found useful. With Google, I often have to search through a lot of “chaff” to find the “wheat”, unless I have used very precise search terms, which is often hard to do. With delicious, the results are based on tags, which can make it easier to find relevant results. It can also be bad in a way, if the tags have been applied carelessly. I will probably use delicious again in the future.

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