j's scratchpad

Christina responds to the quesiton of how much time it takes us to blog and read feeds, which at least one person asked in our session. She focues on the benefits librarians can reap by reading newspapers and how subscribing to feeds from newspapers can save someone time over flipping through a print edition.

I subscribe to about 65 feeds. I estimate that it takes me at least two minutes to type a URL or find a Web site in my bookmarks or through a search, load the site in a browser, and find the new content. By having the items come to me instead, I could be saving 130 minutes or more. I try to read my aggregator at least once a day. Not all 65 feeds appear in it daily. Of course, the biggest time savings are when I can get a feed for a site I visit manually, like The Chronicle of Higher Education or the ResourceShelf.

I find that I am one of those people who reads more because I can get feeds than what I would read on my own. That’s one of the dangers of using feeds and aggregators. But I am also better informed, which not only helps me, but it helps my clients (and my blog readers). I noticed several things on discussion lists recently that I already knew about because I read feeds.

Another way to save time, which I think Garrett mentioned in his presentation (.pdf) and Christina mentions in the post, is to use someone else as a filter. If you know a blogger visits certain sources and consistently points out items you find interesting and relevant, maybe you can use his/her blog or feed as a digest instead of visiting the sources on your own.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 19th, 2004 at 11:54 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.