Week 4 #8 I have a bloglines account and I've added a few feeds to it. Now that I see how it works, though, I'm not crazy about my choices. One is the NY Times art section. It sent me several posts but I really expected more. So I went to the actual NY Times and looked at the arts section. There were more articles and more that I was interested in than what the feed gave me.

I also thought it would be a good idea to get weather information. Mistake. The site I chose--my favorite weather site--updates every hour. So, if you don't look at it every hour you may have 24 posts when you return.

This experience also points out a misconception on my part. I thought "feed" would mean something that moved across the screen like a TV crawl. It turns out Bloglines is just another email account. I do understand what it's for but so far it isn't for me. I'm not trying to keep tabs on a lot of sites. I think I might like a crawl, though--especially for news and local weather. However, in the course of looking around at the one of my chosen sites I did find that I can get the NYTimes movie reviews emailed to me each week--so I am going to do that and see if that works for me.

Another misconception I had was that Bloglines had something to do with my own blog. I thought as I began the process that the feeds I chose would show up on my blog. Once disabused of that notion I decided to investigate adding a feed to my blog and I did it. I added Slate, which I never read but I needed something and I thought of it. So, it is there, you can see it at the bottom of the page. It's not very noticeable and if I cared about it I would try to figure out how to make it more prominent and direct readers to it. But since it is just an experiment I am not going to spend the time.

Once someone from the team has acknowledged that I have added my 10 feeds I am going to start getting rid of at least some of them. As I said, some of them are disappointments.

Surprise! Shortly after I wrote the last post I heard on the radio that You Tube will be removing thousands of videos due to complaints by copyright holder Viacom. Now I have the answer to that question.

Week 3 I have been exploring You Tube a bit. I am amazed at the cleverness of some people-- I saw some very well done tiny little films. It's great that people have a distribution vehicle for their creations. I'm also amazed by the amount of commercial stuff that is on You Tube. What about copyright laws? If Napster was shut down, how does this part of You Tube continue to survive? I have thought since we got TiVo at home that eventually the set-top box would turn TV upside down as more and more people get them. The concept of prime time goes out the window when you can watch whatever you want whenever you want. And who will watch commercials if they don't have to? You Tube seems to be another nail in the coffin with its offerings of things you didn't TiVo.