Thing #9 - Library Feeds

Whew! I feel like I've just been around the world on the web. I had no idea that blogging was so organized and easy to get to. Even though it is not a search tool, one of my favorite ways of finding feeds is to look on the blogs that I enjoy reading to see which ones they subscribe to. Many of those blogs were interesting and expanded on the topics from other blogs.

The Feedster link was not working when I checked it. Through Edublogs, I found A Library By Any Other Name, which seemed very organized and had interesting, short comments. The Google Blog search was very easy, but I didn't find what I was looking for: teen authors or YA authors. Since I have Google Reader, it was very easy to add feeds. An interesting feature of Google is that it lists how many people are subscribed to the blog.

Syndic8 was confusing to me because it returned lots of results that didn't seem to be relevant. Also, I thought the blogs were old until I realized you can sort by date; then the recent rose to the top. Also it seemed confusing to find the link to the actual blog.

One interesting thing I found was that School Library Journal has a long list of feeds on very specific topics that you can subscribe to. I added the feed to Joyce Valenza's Neverending Search. On all the topics she addressed, there wer good links to find more information. I also added the Cool Cat Teacher Blog. I'm still searching for one for teen authors.

I would use Technorati and Topix.net again. Technorati returned some useful blogs and posted lots of video and audio as well. Topix was great for news feeds. I put in plagiarism and found out that bloggers are passionate against plagiarism. I can see that Topix would be very useful for class assignments on current topics.

I didn't really find an unusual blog, but I found an unfamiliar graphic. It seems like many of the individuals who blog put a homepage banner at the top that contains a what seems like a random collection of items that interest them. It's like a collage that reflects their interests. Hmmm....

On one of the Blog searches I found a tool that would let you subscribe to a search for a keyword. In other words, it wasn't a direct blog feed, but a feed that showed where any blogs were talking about a certain subject. Now, I can't find which of the search tools had that; hopefully, I will locate it again. I'm looking forward to checking my feeds regularly and looking for ways to use them.