But, but, but....

(insert whine) But I don't want to start a Bloglines account! I have a Newsgator account and I love it. I know all about RSS feeds. Why are they making me do this? I like the other 22 things, do I have to do this one? (end whine, return to professional librarian voice)

This is why I have left Thing 8 until practically the bitter end. I love the Newsgator account that I set up in a library training class months ago (Thanks Beth, Amy and the gang!) . I have 56 RSS feeds currently and I check my account online almost every day. Why make me duplicate it in another format? So, I looked at a bunch of the promotional materials on Bloglines to see if the features were such that they warranted the effort. Sorry all, but they didn't.

Let me tell you about my feeds. My feeds are really important to me. I have feeds that connect me to the blogs of friends who have moved away- sometimes it's the only way that we stay in touch - commenting on their blogs, or in emails spurred by a blog post. I also have feeds that connect me professionally. I have feeds for several of the School Library Journal blogs (I've been a Fuse 8 fan, though, for much longer than she's been with SLJ) and thus get much of the non-review content of the magazine before it is ever published. I have feeds for the blogs of the 'queens' (my term) of the kidlit blogosphere (Big A, Little A; A Chair a Fireplace and Tea Cozy; Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast and many others). I'm not linking to their blogs here because I don't want them following the link back and looking at this blog. Someday I'll have another blog, one that I'll be less embarrassed to have them come look at and I'll do so). I have feeds from my library catalog for the new books that come into my dept., as well as for other subjects that I am interested in, such as local history. I have feeds for local political blogs, the local section of the newspapers, several webzines and I even get a Bible verse of the day from Biblegateway.com. I must though give special mention to The Librarian in Black, whose blog was the first I ever read regularly (before RSS was even an option) and who introduced me to library 2.0 when the term was first coined. I owe much to her so please check out her blog of "resources and discussions for the 'tech-librarians-by-default among us" if you haven't already.

Before RSS, I had a bookmark list of about 10 blogs/sites that I checked daily. That's all I had time to click through and visit on a daily basis. Now, as I mentioned above, I have over 50 sites that I can keep track of. I could live without half of them, sure, but the other half...

I also want to give a shout out to they guys at unshelved.com, who are actually too important to me to only get an RSS feed - they are also on my Firefox toolbar as one of the sites I need immediate access to. Even on the days when I am too busy to look at my Newsgator account, I need my dose of humor from their comic strip. They often make me laugh out loud and I am very grateful.

I really hope this counts as having completed Thing 8.