Journal #2: Digg RSS Stream

This week I spent some time looking over my Digg stream.  I initially found blogs by searching in the reader itself, but later moved to Googling for well respected blogs.  I decided to split the blogs into folders for things related to the program like web design, Photoshop and elearning as well as folders for other personal interests.  I subscribed to a ton of blogs just to get going and had a mixed experience.

I will begin with the negative aspects.  I found that, first of all  there was an overload of information coming in.  It did help to sort by subject, but this does not change that the feed contained items that may be of interest to me  but were not necessarily something I would search for.  Next, many of the feeds seemed to be based less on the writers personal interest and more on self-promotion and selling books, templates, subscriptions to tutorials etc.

There were positive aspects as well.  There are blogs whose authors express genuine interest in a field and offer great links to information for that community.  It can be inspiring to see this type of passion and interest and it can be fun to follow.  There is also a wealth of great information in blogs that are a  hybrid of having items available for purchase or subscription but also offer high quality content.  Ultimately I feel my RSS feed would be very useful with some pruning.

Q1: What is something you found this week that you feel may use in the future?

A1: The article below about collaborative web design using smart objects in Photoshop was interesting.  I was unfamiliar with a good deal of it, as I am fairly new to Photoshop, but I appreciate the utility of the article and have experienced similar issues with collaboration with other software.

 Click Here to View

I also found that there is an elearning guild.  I was instantly suspicious as the website was so full of ads and opportunities to hand over money to this organization.  This was a bit disappointing, but amy still be worth checking out.

Click Here to View

Q2: In what ways have you gathered information of this sort before?

A2: I do have blogs that I have followed that I trust to have great articles and a solid community.  Two are Creative Cow and Pro Tools Expert.  I did not use a reader, just went there a lot.  This can be limiting because I will realistically only go to a few of these regularly.  I also subscribed to the method of googling a question or subject and clicking on familiar sources for interesting info.  I was aware of RSS but had never tried using it.  I am interested in giving it some time to see if it is useful for me.

I also joined a couple affinity groups:

Edutopia - I hope to find some innovative ideas here.  This is a very large and active community.

Linked in - Instructional Design and eLearning professionals group.  This group seemed to have some interesting posts but I am pretty skeptical of Linked in generally.


I may choose another group if these do not have what I am looking for.