This was an interesting exercise, given I have spent the day running after a two year old. To sit down and have something presented to you on a platter or in this case a screen such as all of the news headlines for the day would be productive. I can see this tool becoming very useful in a personal sphere.
What I did, I created the Bloglines account and subscribed to two of their feeds, Parenting unit and Bookworm. I then thought about what websites I use regularly and went looking for the RSS feed points on those. The blogs that I subscribed to were Bern2007 and Digger, both of which are interesting. I subscribed to The Age news feeds, Whose Your Daddy? from The Age list of blogs, ABC News, Unshelved, Librarybites and Read alert. I tried finding RSS feed points for the following websites and was unable, Peanuts cartoon, San Remo pasta (I like their receipes), Dymocks and Borders. I had a play around on Inside a Dog as well but as I subscribed to Read Alert then I could see why Inside a Dog wouldn't have a feed. I was surprised at the web sites that didn't have feeds, particularly the bookstores, as I could see how this would be a useful tool to have operational. To receive notification about a new release book on the day it hit the shops would for some people be heaven.
One thing I had a problem with using Bloglines was that it took me ages to work out how to unsubscribe from a feed. I looked last night and then gave up until tonight when by chance I stumbled upon it. I discovered that you have to go into one of the feeds and select unsubscribe there instead of returning to the list presented to you when you first subscribe to Bloglines. I thought that this might be a minor issue for users if they didn't have much patience.
How might this be useful in a library, I personally think that this "thing" is much more of a private sphere tool than a public sphere tool. I think this because of the choices in feeds that one needs to make when receiving the feeds. It could be a useful tool in a library for one to keep up with some work related websites and blogs that help us to do our jobs. I can see how if the library was creating the feeds then it could be a useful tool as we would be able to send a direct feed to borrowers who wanted to know about the latest additions to the collections and what events were coming up. Maybe I am sticking my head in the sand but sometimes it is nice at the beach.
As for trying to make my bloglines account part of the public sphere, I can't figure it out. I have looked at the two screen shots and the screen I look at when logged into bloglines doesn't look anything like the one in the discovery exercise section of the activity. I only have two tabs, forums and search unlike the activity which shows the example of three, directory, share and search. I have tried playing around with making the blogs section public and private but it hasn't changed a thing. I will give it a go later on, maybe I will manage it by the end.
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