Thing #3 -- RSS -- April 11

RSS-ing has given me things to read I've never seen before. A few nights ago on the The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, Roger Mudd was being interviewed. He commented that people today don't need to watch a half hour news program when they come home from work because they have already gotten the news during the day and they know what's happened. I can see that that bloggers and blog readers could do that. But I must admit it's not true for me. I rarely check the news during the day, unless I hear some other way of an important event. I recently read in the Chronicle of Higher Education (we get a paper subscription -- I curl up with a cup of tea to read through it every week on the day it arrives) that today's college students are not at all well-informed about what's happening in the world. The Daily Show or the Colbert Report are the closest some of them come to news. For all of their "connectedness," it seems to me that much of what they are connected to is of the "hey whazzup," self-centered variety of information.

Back to learning about RSS. Along the way, I've done several other things so I can easily get to the RSS feeds I've collected:

• created a Yahoo account
• created a Yahoo avatar (which so far I can't get to go anywhere else but the avatar page)
• created a webpage on my G-Mail account as a place to gather the RSS feeds

Several colleagues use g-mail webpages as their major homepage on their computers. I'm experimenting with developing something that might be useful for me in that respect. So far, I've been frustrated with trying to change the template to accommodate the information I want to put there. I don't have the RSS feed link totally working yet. More to learn, obviously!