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.