Non-RSS readers of this blog (are there [m]any of you out there?) may have noticed that I’ve been adding a series of links listed as Reading on the right of the page, right next to the most recent post.
This is a list generated thanks to Google Reader, which allows you to “share” blog posts as you go through them. I like this feature very much - such a nifty way of marking and pointing to interesting posts and creating a link blog. Apart from embedding these links in your blog, they’ve also made it possible for you to share your entire link blog, should you want to. Robert Scoble shares his (there’s a link on his blog), as does Steven Cohen (he’s also got a post asking people to share the links to their shared items).
One feature I do wish was available as part of the shared items feature, is the ability to annotate an item (a la del.icio.us).
I’m still maintaining (ie I haven’t deleted) my Bloglines account, but that is because I use it when I show people how to use RSS. I still haven’t worked out what I’m going to use instead of Bloglines in the classroom situation. Google Reader is fine and works very well, but the fact that you need a Google account to use it might be an obstacle to some. Although you could argue that you need a Bloglines account to use Bloglines (a Yahoo account to use Yahoo, a Yahoo account to use Flickr- bah!, a del.icio.us account to use del.icio.us…). I have a keeping-up-to-date (alerting services and RSS) class to teach next week, it’ll all come to a head then, I suspect.
