I talked with Phil Cubeta yesterday about the GivingMarket in what turned out to be a great lesson in blogging. I came to blogging as a writing practice, and certainly it can be that. What I am slowly coming to understand, or to understand how to practice, is blogging as listening and linking. He reminded me about using Technorati to follow who’s linking to me.
I’m still working on some good BlogLines and Technorati habits, learning how to use them without effort and especially how to weather the ups and downs of being in and out of the office for chunks. It used to be that a few days or weeks away and there would be a pile of email. Now there’s an aggregator pile, a technorati pile, a couple of wiki piles, and and and… it gets to be a pile of piles. Until one finds a rhythm, or is it discovering the right filters?
And now there’s the GivingMarket blog to weave into the mix as well. Getting ready to leave for a month in Nepal and six in London. Nothing like a little time on the road to strip away a whole bunch of stuff and get back down to essential rhythms and practices. Deciding and re-deciding where to give attention and what to make real.
I don’t know if this will be helpful regarding using bloglines…
if it doesn’t help, stick with bloglines anyways because it rocks.
If you use Firefox, we have a bloglines toolbar that makes it a snap to subscribe to feeds, search bloglines, and access your bloglines.
http://www.firefoxtoolbar.com/bloglines
I hope it helps you to use bloglines.
-Pat
Michael, I’ve started to use Bloglines to look not only at the blogs I’m interested in, but also at recent changes from my various wiki interests. Works pretty well. What’s the deal with technorati? I signed up over there but am not sure what to do with it or what ends up on your pile from there. Whatever it is, can you RSS it as well?
thanks, got it all cleaned up and resettled last night.
thanks, pat. i’ll have a look at the firefox bit. i’m a mozilla guy, so i’m close by already.
and yes, i need to get the wikis in the bloglines page, ted. good reminder. and the technorati thing is just another thing to check right now. i need to learn more. the essential shift seems to be about moving from monitoring mode to conversation mode, in general. technorati is just part of the listening i think. not sure if it RSSes. try it?
Turns out Technorati calls it a watchlist and it’s an RSS feed which I then added to bloglines. Easy stuff. Fewer and fewer piles, Michael. 🙂