I like to keep track of possible good reads to get to later on. The Amazon Wish list is a very good place to store names of books I might well enjoy at some time. Especially if I learn of a book that sounds good but is far off my current topic, I add it to my wish list. You can create more than one and I have several, such as one of books that might be good to read aloud. You can choose and re-choose which list is the default, the one Amazon assumes you are after unless you specify something else.
There are well over 100 MILLION blogs on the internet now. Some are MABs, multi-author blogs, such as the New York Times blog "Well". Some are single author blogs. Some have new posts frequently and some have new posts only once in a while. But, as you can imagine, 100 million attempts to communicate are nearly certain to contain some very good material: fun to know, valuable, witty, tender, imaginative, etc. As I surfed here and there, I would run into a blog that seemed valuable. At first, I tried to post snippets of the more promising ones on my own blog page. My blog page is already more crowded than many people would advise if I were trying to attract lots of people. I already run 29 blog bits on that page and 29 is not a very big fraction of 100 MILLION.
So, I needed a wish list for blogs. I saw that Google had a "reader", a "place" to receive the latest posts on blogs and I used it to list blogs of interest as I ran into them. The reader automatically updates each blog assigned to it with the latest post, whenever the author puts up something new. I tried to be fairly conservative in adding blogs to my Reader but I found more than 50 that I thought I wanted to try to have at least occasional contact with. The Google Reader worked pretty well as a repository, a mailbox if you will, of the latest posts.
Then, about mid-March, Google announced it was discontinuing the Reader as of July 1. I hadn't made much use of it so I wasn't terribly disturbed but I did see comments here and there about people being disappointed or upset. I got to thinking that maybe I didn't want to just have my little collection erased. I figures there were probably sites that wanted the traffic. I looked up alternative readers and the topic jumped up as a suggestion so I knew there was indeed interest from both users and sites. One of the suggestions was Feedly, which I had never heard of. I visited the site and found info and links that said "If you are a Google Reader user looking for a new home, click here." The software quickly transferred all my feeds to a new home in Feedly.
It surprises me how difficult it is to get a simple list of the blogs I have included in my collection. Besides the names, a complete test would check that the blog still exists. I didn't do a complete test but here is somewhat of a list of the ones I have paid some attention to. There is a Feedly iPad app and it has an inviting interface. I am using it daily to look over some good posts.
--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
