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...

Thing 3 - RSS and Google Reader

Some quick first impressions...

Google reader gives me a headache! It's so cluttered and monotonic. The feeds themselves appear in the same font size as all the clutter down the sides and above, which means that, regardless of content, they just don't make me want to read them! I can probably change this somehow, but at the moment I'm feeling so frazzled and overwhelmed from looking at it for even a few minutes, I just can't be bothered. I'll have to investigate further tomorrow...

My instincts tell me that, in theory, RSS is a great idea, but if it means losing all the formatting, colour, variety and visual stimulation that you get from reading the same text in its natural environment, so to speak (e.g. Judith Mackrell's dance reviews on the Guardian website, rather than fed to Google reader), then I think I'll stick with web browsing to get my information.

I think I'm taking a risk with this post. It's gone 5pm (home-time!), I'm hungry, tired, and haven't really researched the topic thoroughly yet. Is this blogging suicide? Oh well. No doubt I will learn a valuable lesson regarding the foolishness of posting in such circumstances...