My chosen RSS reader has been Bloglines pretty much since the beginning. I probably tried one or two other ones before landing with Bloglines, but I can’t even remember what the name of them even were.

As I was working through some new sources of information this evening, I started subscribing to their RSS feeds. Then I saw an option to subscribe by email and thought that might be a better option these days.

You see I’m always in my email, but I’m not always in Bloglines. Would it be better to just subscribe by email for everything again? I think to do that I’d need to really think through how I’d organize my email Inbox and folder structure to support that influx of additional email. I think I’m averaging about 300 emails a day right now.

How’s your use of RSS going? Is it still the best method for you to stay current on information? Do you use twitter instead? Have you thought about going back to email as the single point of intake for information?

Post from: EveryJoe

RSS Bankruptcy

I stayed away from del.icio.us for quite awhile, but have recently started using that as well to organize my websites. My thoughts behind using del.icio.us was to export all my existing bookmarks to it, but then also use it as a storage place for all the interesting websites I came across regularly.

I’ve got Firefox bookmarks, I run Internet Explorer because I have a number of clients that have their as their corporate default browser so I have IE favorites as well. Then there’s the Google toolbar bookmarks and my del.icio.us links going too. Although not quite a favorite or bookmark, I’ve also got all my RSS feeds stored in Bloglines. How do you keep everything organized?

There’s a challenge with me of trying to figure out how to effectively use everything as needed without duplicating effort or usefulness. I think the best way to move forward is to really look at each tool and determine how you want to use each one for yourself. As you’re using it, then remember how and when you’ve decided to use each one for it’s own specific task.

Post from: EveryJoe

What’s Your Favorite Bookmarking Tool

Here’s how Outlook 2007 is proposed to handle the situation:

A blogger writes five posts; A, B, C, D, E.
Outlook user downloads A, B, C, D, E.

Outlook user deletes a few posts and is left with A, C, D.

The blogger updates the content of B, C. For simplicity call them B1, C1. He also writes post F.

Outlook downloads the XML and sees the changes.

Outlook ignores the updates of the posts the user has explicitly deleted and updates the content of the ones that still exist automatically, leaving the user with posts A, C1, D, F.

This makes perfect sense to me. I currently use Bloglines for my RSS reader and have all my subscriptions checked to ignore updates. Updates to a post just annoy me, mainly because the update isn’t clearly identified, so you end up re-reading the entire post looking for the change. Maybe you’re lucky and able to find it, for me it’s not worth it, so I ignore them.

All of this still doesn’t change my #1 priority for an RSS management tool. I’ve got to be able to check my subscriptions from multiple locations on multiple machines and never worry about missing an article or having to read the same article multiple times.

Post from: EveryJoe

RSS Functionality in Outlook