Be the Master of Your Domain, How to Conquer Your Feed Reader

Bobbi Newman — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 10:47:46 +0000

I’ve heard many of my friends comment that they are overwhelmed by their Google Reader, so much so that not only are they regularly declaring Reader bankruptcy but that they are avoiding it all together. My information professional friends, Google Reader is a TOOL, do not allow it to inspire fear and loathing, it’s there to meet your needs. Here are some suggestions for mastering it.

Don’t be afraid to declare bankruptcy

For me this means in the weeks leading up to and during and after conferences I will likely declare bankruptcy once a week. I don’t wait until the end, it’s too overwhelming, I just go in once a week, fully knowing I’m going to mark all as read and do it.

If you’re declaring bankruptcy too often you are subscribed to more than you can keep up with, if that is 20, 200, or 2,000 it doesn’t matter. You put those feeds in there because you thought they were important. You need to figure out what the most important ones are, so you can keep up with those. It’s ok to let the others go. Better that than feeling bad. You need to figure out what you’re looking for in feeds, what information are you interested in, what are your priorities. The first step is putting them in folders.

Organize

Come on! you’re a librarian, we like to assign things to categories. Make folders or tags in your reader. You can call the folders whatever you want but they should indicate your priorities. If you already have folders take some time to re-evaluate them.

Daily – I try to read these every day, they are top priority.
Me – my feeds to monitor mentions of me, my blog or links to my blog. If you’re not monitoring yourself you should be.
Friends – friends blogs
Transliteracy – some feeds I have set up monitoring transliteracy mentions, blogs related to transliteracy and some Google alerts for potential blog posts.
Non-lib – blogs I read that are not about or written by librarians
Weekly – less important things
CVL – feeds to monitor mentions of my library online.

Weed

You need to get rid of what you aren’t reading and what aren’t priorities. You could just start from scratch, unsubscribe from everything then add new things as you see fit. Or you could try selective weeding.

Read with awareness. If, as you’re reading, you realize a blog posts too often, doesn’t write in the style you prefer, no longer meet your needs or align with your priorities and goals – unsubscribe, don’t read anything because you feel you “should”

Ask yourself if you are getting the information somewhere else, like Twitter or Facebook. Do you prefer that method? Unsubscribe. Ask if you can get the info somewhere else? Prefer that method? Unsubscribe.

Look at what you are reading. Under “All Stuff” is a “Trends” link

There is a lot of information underneath here.

Take a look at the Subscription Trends first. .

First weed anything under Inactive.
Then take a look at Frequently Updated. Maybe if it updates too frequently you should consider unsubscribing. I’ve done this with some very popular tech sites. Not that they don’t have great information, but I noticed that I will see anything important they post through Twitter and Facebook. Since I can not keep up with all of their posts I let the hive mind filter it for me.

Now look at the Reading Trends tabs: Read, Clicked, Starred, Shared, Emailed and mobile. This tells you want you are actually reading. This is important. Are you reading what you put in your Daily folder? If not why not?

Repeat as necessary.

What tips or suggestions do you have for organizing and conquering RSS feeds?

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Don’t Miss These Twitter and Facebook Guides from Mashable

Bobbi Newman — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 15:51:13 +0000

Whether you are teaching a class, helping a friend or just looking for information for yourself these guides from Mashable are a great resource.

The Facebook Guide topics include:

Facebook 101: The Basics
Managing Your Facebook Wall
Using Facebook for Business
How to become a fan of Mashable
Using Facebook Applications
Facebook 305:Advanced Topics

Twitter Guide topics include:

Twitter 101 – The Basics
Building Your Twitter Community
Twitter for Business
Twitter Guide Book To Go: PDF Download and Slideshow
Sharing on Twitter
Managing Your Twitter Stream

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One more way to use Flickr – videos!

Bobbi Newman — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:31:21 +0000

Earlier this month I attended a Mobius conferernce session about vodcasting in libraries. I came back all inspired and fired up. I don’t think our patrons are ready for vodcasting yet but that didn’t stop me from making videos. Even better is was perfect timing for Flickr allowing 90 second videos that are much better quality than YouTube.

Our reference staff has been talking about proactive reference, empowering patrons to use some of the online tools themselves. So I started making videos of how to do some basics and posted them on MRRL’s flickr account. Right now they’re getting a lot of views on Flickr, and we’re getting a wiki set up that is linked from all the OPAC pages so the videos are always available to the patrons from the online catalog

[flickr video=2625853778]

Does your library have a Flickr account yet? What other video topics could you cover for your patrons?Similar Posts: