Feeds

My friend Ryan once told me, "it's all about feeds." This was probably 2 years ago and we were talking about Web 2.0 things and the semantic web--ideas which like cloud computing are a stretch for my imagination, even now. I understand more about feeds, but I'm no expert. When I subscribe to a feed, content is delivered to me or more specifically to my reader. My reader, in my case, Google Reader, brings all of my feeds together in one spot: customizable content, automatically updated.
This morning I made my first blogroll using my feeds. A blogroll is posted to a website or blog and it shows readers the blogs to which you subscribe and read. I have been listing blogs by hand in a link widget from Blogger--definitely old school. I just didn't understand the power of the feed. I have many a blog socked away into my Google Reader: edublogs, mommy blogs, artist blogs and the like. Today I learned how to use tags/folders to get them a bit more organized. It was a simple step to go from organizing to sharing. You know my fondness for "omatic" web tools, screencast-o-matic being the first among them. Well, Google might not have the o-matic moniker, but it sure made creating a blog roll easy, once I read a quick how to.

So now, the Portable Teacher teaching blog that I started this fall with a few friends, has an automatically updating blogroll. How cool is that?