I recall a time not too many years ago, that I kept running into very scary pages full of frightening code, with scary acronyms like xml and rss popping up in them. I knew I should figure it all out, but I kept saying “later”! I’m sure many people can relate to that feeling.

Finally, I took the plunge and instead of drowning, I’m swimming gleefully. I drew this silly sketch to use in classes that I teach, it shows a happy smiling me with all my favorite web sites sending me information. (it was inspired by a far more polished graphic!)

I’ve used bloglines, google reader, desktop feed readers, netvibes, igoogle, pageflakes and probably some other tools too. For now I use Google Reader the most. I keep a tab open in my browser and dip into it now and then throughout the day.

The advice that “You don’t have to read every single RSS item!” is key! Ignore the onslaught of info if you want to, dip in and read what looks interesting,
scan the headlines, save things that you want to refer back to.
Important stuff that you missed, will usually pop up in another place. We don’t all have to be on the cutting edge every minute (we used to call it the “bleeding edge” at my FPOW!)

How I keep up:

• Scan the headlines.Don’t read everything.
• Save items to come back to later (yeah, sometimes you won’t get back to them!)
• Mark everything as “read” now and then, (ah, doesn’t that feel good?)
• Don’t hesitate to add new stuff – better to add it than forget where that really useful resource is.
• That said, drop suscriptions that you never read
• Organize things into groups that work for you – “must read” “fun” “work” “personal” – whatever works for your life.