Thing 3 - Set Up an RSS Account & Add Feeds

What do you like about RSS and newsreaders?
I enjoy logging into one place and having the importing education news of the day come to me. My strategy is to open my Bloglines, scan the headlines (the titles of the blog posts), and then skim the posts with interesting or pertinent headlines. The news blogs contain links to online newspapers, so if the story is very interesting I'll click the link to read the actual news story. Then, I can either bookmark the story for later or forward it to someone else who might enjoy reading it.

Basically, the people writing the blogs I subscribe to are doing all the work of visiting each news website and gathering the Higher Education or library related news stories and linking them to their blogs. By subscribing to these blogs in my Bloglines, I save a lot of time by not having to visit all of those news websites myself.

How do you think you might be able to use this technology in your school or personal life?
If the professors in my liaison departments wrote blogs, I could keep up with departmental happenings through subscribing to those blogs in my RSS feed reader. Also, I could subscribe to blogs pertaining to the news in my various liaison subjects, so that I could keep abreast of the news in those fields. I could even forward interesting articles to professors as I find them.

In my personal life, I could subscribe to my long-distance friends' blogs, though most of my long-distance friends have migrated their online presence to Facebook, which contains its own "news feed", similar to RSS. I could also subscribe to the blogs of organizations or issues that I am interested in, to keep up-to-date with the happenings in those organizations.

Find any great sources we should all add to our feed reader?
All academic librarians should subscribe to the Kept-Up Academic Librarian blog.
I also subscribe to The Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog, The Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus Blog, the CNN Education blog, Paul Pival's blog The Distant Librarian, and the Librarian's Internet Index New This Week blog.