RSS Posting II

It's been a little over a week since I set up my RSS aggregator. In this short time I can definitely see why Steve Hargadon said in our class that RSS can be information overload and why Dr. Z told us he had many many podcasts on his computer that he has not listened to yet. There is so much information at your finger tips with RSS that it can be mind-boggling.

My usual morning before RSS would consist of anywhere from 15 minutes to 30 minutes reading the headlines in the local news (waterloo courier), checking the sports scores (espn.com), reading my email, checking weather conditions (weatherchannel.com). I would sometimes also check local tv listings (tvguide.com) if there was a program I was intending to watch. I stopped my old habits when I set up my aggergator.

I tried to get into a routine in the morning where I would check my igoogle and google reader for any new material. I was able to add all the pages I listed above into my aggregator as well as many more (it is so easy to add "stuff" to your page) that I found interesting. I did not set a time limit on how long I looked at things in the morning, but I did time how long I ended up looking at links and whatnot from my igoogle/google reader. I averaged well over 30 minutes each day with my tops being over an hour and a half! Let's just say things around the office didn't get done during that time. There were several occasions where I would start reading the sports headlines, then move on to local news, only to come back to my page to see that the sports headlines had already been updated! I of course had to go read those then.

Before my next post I plan on trying to organize a little differently so I am not glued to my screen. I cannot afford to spend as much time on the RSS feeds as I have been so I will need to come up with a new plan. I will keep you all updated.