Can I get a blogroll please?

I was trying to avoid it, but I guess if you want to be "in the know" then you have to expand who and what you are reading. I think my first blogroll only had 5 blogs. Since then, it just keeps growing. Recently, I can blame it on Twitter. As I was following the tweets from Internet Librarian 2008, I discovered that there were a lot of smart people out there sharing information from the conference and some great insight of their own. I have really enjoyed the blog of librarian Nicole Engard who is an Open Source Evangelist at LibLime. Her blog is called What I Learned Today. What I love about it is that it is simple, straightforward talk about figuring out this crazy thing everyone calls 2.0. It is obvious that she is staying on top of all the news that is news. If I think my blogroll is getting long, I don't have anything on her. Check out this list! So, if you want to find great blogs to read, here are some ways to start:

• Find people on you like to follow on Twitter and check out their profile to see if they have a blog.
• If you use Google Reader, check out the Top Recommendations.
• Follow the links when people who you do read talk about others they are reading.
• Check out the blogrolls of other bloggers.

And of course the most important thing, add the new blogs to your RSS reader and create your own blogroll.

RSS? YES!!!

The first person who ever mentioned RSS to me was Rachel Rubin. I miss that girl now that she is working at Worthington Libraries. I considered her my 2.0 mentor. Thanks Rachel!

In this post I want to encourage everyone who has never tried RSS and thinks it sounds like a foreign language to give it a try. I will admit, when Rachel first told me about it, it sounded very confusing. I promise it is not.

I started out using Bloglines, because that is what they showed us in a workshop I took called "Becoming Librarian 2.0." I really like Bloglines. It is very organized, and keeping feeds that I want to read later is easy too.

After all the tweeting about Google Reader, I decided to give it a try. I instantly did not like it as well. However, I refused to be that person who won't give something new a chance because they are "used to" something else.

What I do like about Google Reader is that it recommends other blogs based on my reading habits. I had heard about Librarian In Black but then I forgot about her blog. Google Reader suggested it, so I added it to my feeds. I was glad I did, because she had some really insightful things to say about Internet Librarian 2008. She even posted a blog about our own CML Digital Services team. I can also see current feeds in Google Reader from my igoogle page. My bloglines gadget only tells me when I have feeds waiting, but I have to open a new window and login to read them.

For now, I am using both until I decide which one works better for me. Until then, the jury is out.