Thing 3 - Google Reader again (or rather, Google Launchpad)

Having just spent the last fifteen minutes quite happily reading through the new items that had been syndicated, really simply, to my Google Reader 'inbox', it looks like I'm going to have to admit that my initial panic was misplaced. I had some really helpful comments to my last post (thank you!), which brought me around to a new way of thinking about the reader. In response to my comments about the bland, visually unexciting presentation of feeds in the reader, several other 23thingers mentioned that they often have a quick scan of what's new in the reader, and then click through to see the items of interest at their source (i.e. with all their formatting and visual stimulation etc). So, I've started to think of Google Reader as a launchpad. It's brilliant in gathering into one place what's new from the various sites and blogs that I'm following, but it needn't be the prison I feared, holding me captive whilst I plow through reams of monotypic text, framed by all that clutter (and in fact, as I've just spent a quarter of an hour quite calmly browsing, I think perhaps this fear was a monster of my own making!). I am still very wary of the potential for RSS to be completely overwhelming, and in light of this I will be careful to limit the number of subscriptions I make, and be sure to check regularly for new items. Like Erin, I feel strangely compelled to read everything that is fed to me, so I really want to avoid being inundated. If I'm conscientious about it, I think I can make Google Reader work for me...