Thing #11

Finding Good Feeds

Now that you have an RSS reader (your Feedly account), you can begin adding other feeds that interest you. Technorati, a blog tracking site, reports that they are currently tracking millions of blogs. Out of all these blogs available, how do you find the ones that are of most value to you? There are several resources that you can use.

First, read this post from The Cool Cat Teacher blog for some great suggestions on how to select good RSS feeds: How to Create Your Circle of the Wise.

Next, explore some other options for locating appropriate RSS feeds.

Discovery Resources

• When visiting your favorite websites -- look for RSS feed icons (like those on the left above) that indicate the website provides it. Often a feed icon will be displayed somewhere in the navigation bar of the site.
  
  
• Consider Edublogs' award winners
  
  
• Other Search tools that can help you find feeds:
  
  
  • Google Blog Search - See what appears when you search "instructional technology" or "Austin Peay State University"
    
    
  • Blogsearchengine.org - This search tool allows you to locate recent newsfeed items based upon keyword or phrase searching.
    
  • Technorati - Technorati is a popular blog finding tool that lets you search for blogs. Since RSS feeds are inherent to all blogging tools, Technorati Blog Search can help you find RSS feeds for topic specific blogs in which you may be interested.
    

Discovery Exercise

1. Explore some of the search tools noted above that can help you locate some RSS feeds.
   
   
2. Add any feeds you like to your RSS reader.
   
   
3. Create a blog post about your experience that answers these questions:
   *Which method of finding feeds did you find easiest to use?
   *Which was more confusing?
   *What kind of useful feeds did you find in your travels?
   *Or what kind of unusual ones did you find?
   *What other tools or ways did you find to locate newsfeeds?

EXTRA STUFF -- Feed icon information:

In February of 2006, the adoption of a standard feed icon among websites and browsers finally began to assist in stopping the madness and confusion caused by so many variations. So far this icon has been adopted by most websites and browsers.


Internet Explorer has something like this as well. For more information about this emerging new standard, see Feedicons.com