I am taking a digital media course this summer with Dr. Mark Grabe and I am learning to use aggregators. I’m embarrassed that I haven’t been using them but nope; I didn’t know which one to use and didn’t feel like I had time to read other people’s blogs anyway. I am really enjoying it though. Using Google Reader (GR) as the aggregator rather than Bloglines which I think might be more intuitive but not sure if it’s as powerful. GR let’s you choose post by post what you want to make public where I think in Bloglines you have to choose the entire subscription. I’m not 100% sure of that - still reading. I want to make my blogroll come up here on my blog but I’m still figuring that one out.
Educational value is quite obvious; social networking of course being the main advantage; for example, Mark wrote about Jott in one of his blog entries, which i saw in my GR page, and I immediately signed up - what a brilliant idea! I also immediately told my husband about it and he signed up. In someone else’s blog that is pushed to my GR page, I read about a 5th grader who blogs and now i have my 4th grader all excited about blogging this summer - she even called her friends to brag about her blog, MoMo Meanders (beware of bright pink; wear shades). When we went outside we took photos to put on her blog. I hope it lasts. Examples of social networking at it’s best.
My only concern is that there will be TOO much information to process coming into Google Reader and it will pile up and then I’ll never want to open it; though I did add my twitter feed which will be neat to see. There are so many ways to reach out I don’t know how to keep up with them all. I started a google portal page (igoogle) so maybe that will help keep everything organized. It’s like pageflakes and netvibe but i’m used to the layot and feel of google so i’m sticking with.
