Stirring Up the Dust

For one to truly get the most out of blogging, besides creating your own blog, of course, you should read other blogs.  Other blogs are a great form of professional development and help you to keep your thumb on the pulse of blogging.  The other blogs that I read regularly are listed in my blogroll.  I found these blogs through Google searches, by looking at blogrolls on other blogs, and simply by following links from comments on blogs I read.  I am going to try and keep my blogroll under 20 blogs so that I don’t get into INFORMATION OVERLOAD, which is easily done.

 So, how exactly do I manage to keep up with updates to so many different blogs?  I currently use Bloglines to handle that bit of business.  Bloglines is a FREE online service that maintains a list of sites I am interested in and alerts me when new posts are made to the site.  In technical terms,  Bloglines is my aggregator or RSS reader.  Rather than checking 20+ different sites, I can access Bloglines from any computer with internet access and see what’s new on the sites I subscribe to.  Bloglines offers many other features that I encourage you to check out on their site.

 Bloglines is not the only aggregator out there, but seems to be the best “beginner” site.  Jeff Utecht wrote a great comparison on his blog about 4 of the most recognized aggregators -Bloglines, Google Reader, Pageflakes, and Netvibes.  Read all about them.  Decide which one you’d like to try.  Dust off the old keyboard, and start that blogroll!

 Happy blogging!

Technorati Tags: aggregator, bloglines, googlereader, netvibes, pageflakes, RSS, blogging