RSS Feeds are great but I never use them!

(Week 4, Thing 8)

I set up a Bloglines account about two months ago as part of my work for 23 Things. I planned on posting something about it on this blog soon after, but I became distracted by things that were just more interesting. RSS feeds gather headlines and blurbs from various websites so that they can be read efficiently without going to each individual site. This is more efficient, but I like going to the individual sites each day!

I only check about ten sites daily, and several of these - such as Hotmail - cannot be compiled into bloglines. I had to stretch to add ten websites to my bloglines account. It's actually easier for me to just check the five or six blogs and news websites that I read each day than it is to maintain my bloglines account. Additionally, I don't like the way that bloglines stips many of the original websites of their format. I prefer the original design of the site creators.

RSS feeds have their place, but they just aren't relevant to me at this point. I have friends who work for PR departments of various companies and RSS feeds make their lives far more efficient. Each day they need to check all of the blogs about the industries they work for to see if anyone has posted a comment that could affect his or her company. There can often be 20+ relevant blogs for this type of analysis, so Bloglines can help them a lot. However, I just don't read enough websites to get any real use out of my Bloglines account.