Thing 8 - RSS and a news reader

I spent way more time on this thing than the recommended time or the previous ones-- I think because I can see a personal use for this that I might actually keep up. I really wanted to understand what RSS can do, so I listened carefully to the podcast, paid close attention to the tutorial and set up a bloglines account at http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs and added two newsfeeds for regional news from out-of-town newspapers that I regularly look at and several weather feeds for my home an other areas that I regularly look at. Then I added a few of the suggested ones, the dictionary word-of-the day, a librarian's cartoon site and a PLA blog. Then I added a feed from the 23 things blog of a colleague who is progressing on the 23 things at about the same rate I am- then I added a feed for a specific tag in Flickr for a geographic area that I love. Since many of these are of personal interest to me, I expect I will keep up with them. I can see the utility professionally if you are following a specific issue in the library press, especially if you are on a task force studying a certain issue, but the real draw for me is the application to my personal life. The personal sites I added feeds to are for sites that I visit individually a lot anyway, so that does promise to be a timesaver for me. I would be wary of adding too many feeds for things I wouldn't normally already want to know about, because then I would be wading through too many extraneous things every day. I particularly value knowing now what the icon is- Before it was just one of the things I ignored because I didn't recognize it. Now it pops out at me everywhere. I would also add in this post the realization that there is no way I can do this training at work. As a part-time person without my own computer, it is just too time-consuming and too difficult to find extended time to concentrate without interruption. When I have attempted to do it at work, I find my understanding is not thorough and I feel rushed and sometimes discouraged. I am doing my posting and keeping up my log at work, but it is working much better to do the rest of the work at home. It's better for me, and I will know in the end I have more mastery, but there is something about the lack of time at work that doesn't feel right.