My eyes and brain hurt. I'm overwhelmed with information, and I've only subscribed to the "required" feeds. I'm excited about making room for Google Reader in my busy reading life. However, there is definitely a "RSS literacy" that I have to adapt. When I was first looking at my feeds, I had them in in the expanded form. I thought, "This sucks. I can't handle all of this information!" I felt compelled to read every word instead of sifting through the text. But then I discovered that handy "List" option (after watching the very helpful video). And that made reading so much easier for me because it's only one line of information, and I was able to decide if I wanted to explore further by reading that little line of text rather than a big chunk. I guess our brains are trained to do this because of the way email is set up, but it makes me think about training younger brains to read this way. Because of TAKS passages, we don't teach kids to skim and scan. We want them to READ EVERY WORD, which for the TAKS test is essential. But I'm beginning to realize how important it is for me to teach the information literacy skills that are vital when using technology. I need to make a goal of teaching my kids the different ways of "reading" when they come into the library. I just love my job!
I subscribed to the required feeds, as well as the NY Times. I chose the Book Reviews for obvious reasons, and one review in particular caught my eye. David Pogue reviewed The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick. As an admitted Facebook junky, of course this review interested me, and it made me want to add this book to my ever-growing list of "must reads." I especially found this fact a bit startling: "Facebook is the second-most-visited Web site on earth (after Google). The average member spends almost an hour there each day. It has more than 400 million active users — over 20 percent of everyone on the Internet — and is growing by 5 percent a month."
At least I'm not alone in my obsession.
However, I'm beginning to realize that I need to cut down on my Facebook time to make room for for my Google Reader. I have also made the connection that I need to read my Google Reader the way I read Facebook--very quickly and very often.
So many books, blogs, sites, articles, RSS feeds...so little time.
Don't feel guilty about marking "all things read" if you get overwhelmed. I've been doing this for some time, forget to check my feeder and then just start from scratch. You won't miss it and you don't need to feel overwhelmed by it either! Happy reading.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that I have to constantly remind myself is that the internet is not immune to conventional wisdom: everything in moderation. Google Reader is like every other internet concept - you'll go through periods where you're obsessed with checking it and periods when you really just don't want to bother. :)
ReplyDeleteI don't know if you can still do this anymore, but at some point in the past you were able to get an RSS feed of your Facebook friends status updates, so I can check Facebook from inside my Google Reader! Of course, you don't see all the pictures and links and other fun stuff, but if you just want to see what everyone is doing quickly, it's great!
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