We Are Media Toolbox: RSS Readers
Welcome to Day 2 of the We Are Media Toolbox extravaganza! Today's topic: RSS readers.
There's so much more information out there than we can competently digest, one of the skills we need to master in this new age is information management. Enter RSS readers. One of the first people I remember hearing talk about RSS and readers in the nonprofit space was Marnie Webb. I'm glad I heard her, because I would be lost without my reader!
I use Netvibes, and I've learned a lot of nifty tricks to customize it from MarshallK (to whom I still owe a lunch). You can see most of my Netvibes reader: it has a handy feature that lets me share it publicly.
What do you use to manage your RSS feeds? What do you like about it? What do you wish it would do better? How might nonprofit staffers specifically benefit from it? Share in comments, below, or on the wiki!
I use Google Reader, which I find particularly useful simply because many family, friends and co-workers have gmail accounts. Therefore, it's been much easier to spread adoption (particularly at work), which is important to me because most of these people have never used an RSS Reader and getting them started is an integral part of helping them to become regular (and good) bloggers. It has also helped, because as we use the "share" function, we're all together in the same shared community - meaning everyone doesn't need to sign up for delicious accounts. The ability to add tags and search functionality are great too.
One thing I've stressed to people is not to worry about the number of unread items. Unlike e-mail, where it IS always good to have an inbox near zero, a full RSS reader just means you've got lots of stuff to look at whenever you have the time. Making sure they know that reading blogs isn't their job and learning not to feel guilty about unread items has been the surprisingly difficult part - explaining how and why to use the RSS reader and then seeing adoption has been shockingly easy.