Aggregate+feeds

Now that we all (or most of us) have been able to set up blogs and start posting, it is time, as Emerald mentioned in class, to have a more convenient way of collecting the feeds from all of them in order to go to one place on the web to read them. This is called **aggregating feeds** (much like the way your Timeline on Facebook pulls in feeds from all of your various friends). Feed aggregation is made possible through RSS or "Really Simply Syndication," which, according to Alec Courous, "is one of the most important social media tools as well as often the least understood. [. . . . ] It saves individuals the time it would take to go to each news source (e.g., webpage) and helps to organize information."
 * RSS is easy to understand once you begin to use it, and is very powerful. RSS in Plain English is another useful video from Common Craft explaining how RSS works.

I have linked all of our blogs on the 21st-Century Literacies Ning (in the sidebar on the left-hand side of the page). I have also listed them in a Google doc for your convenience (for copying and pasting into a feed aggregator). Choose one of the following options as a way to aggregate ENG 307 feeds. Which one you choose is largely a matter of personal preference.
 * Use iGoogle to pull in feeds from ENG 307 Blogs (format is much like a newspaper, which I prefer). See a picture of my page here.
 * Set up an iGoogle account in order to use iGoogle to pull in feeds from your classmates if you don't already have one.
 * Here's a wonderful mini-intro to iGoogle from GoogleMexico that transcends linguistic barriers to explain this app! @http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PugUziGhn4Y&feature=related
 * Reserve the main page for your personal stuff. Here's a snapshot of mine.
 * Watch this screencast about how to aggregate other classmembers' feeds onto another page of your "reader" and add create such a page in your iGoogle aggregator. It was made for a previous class, but you can use it to create a tab on your igoogle account titled "ENG 307 S2012.
 * Alternatively, if you prefer to use Google Reader to pull in your classmate's feeds. Take a look at the information on @Google Reader here. Here's a view of what Google Reader looks like (more of a linear format that allows you to scroll through posts but to read them largely in their entirety on the reader.
 * Other popular RSS aggregators include Bloglinesand Netvibes.