Things 4, 5, & 6

I'm starting to feel like I'm in the middle of a Dr. Seuss poem. As you can see, I've been fiddling with the design of my blog. I didn't realize there were more background options! I want to make it even fancier but don't have time at the moment to figure out how.

So, onto the reason why we're here. This week was relatively easy for me, since I already have a Google Reader and Delicious account. Google Reader has quickly become one of my favorite things. When I was first introduced to blogs, I found it quite cumbersome to visit each distinct site to stay updated. Then a friend showed me how to set up an RSS feed and voila! All of my news is there for me in one place. Sometimes it starts to get out of hand though. Yes, all of my feeds are coming to one place, but when you sign in and see you have 50-100 new posts to read, it can be pretty overwhelming. When I start to feel bogged down I will re-examine my subscriptions. Are there blogs I'm just scrolling through without reading? Has the tone of the blog changed so that I don't find it interesting anymore? Once I've answered those questions, I'll go through and delete some subscriptions.

Before yesterday, I hadn't signed into my Delicious account in awhile. It was neat to go through and see the sites I'd bookmarked about a year ago. Although I haven't used it recently, I actually really love this tool and see such great potential for it in libraries. At my library, we often get emails from staffers sharing a cool website they've found. But who wants to have keep all of those emails? If they added it to a Delicious account, not only would all of that information be in one place, but it would be searchable. Searchabilty is key because what good is awesome information if you can't find it??

And finally, Google Alerts, Social Mention and Addictomatic. I think all of these are useful tools, but my favorite was Addictomatic. I loved the set up and how information was aggregated from many different sources on one page. I tried to add a Social Mention widget to my page (see below), but I'm not sure it's correct. It doesn't seem to be displaying my search terms. If anyone has insight, please share!

I'm not sure how much these last 3 tools fit into my daily routine since my library has a separate PR department that handles 99% of our marketing. I think they would benefit immensely from them, though.

Off to add some more blogs to my Reader!