RSS feeds

I may be regarded as uncooperative this week, because I haven't really done as I've been told. I would like to think I'm "taking charge of your own learning", and obeying the spirit of the exercise if not the letter. I will let the Learning 2.0 overlords decide if I should be banished.


My first thought was "oh no, another account to create." This almost made me drop out, but I decided to look for alternatives. After looking around a bit, and doing some RSS exploring, I discovered that the Google account I set up for the blog has a Google Reader option that lets you access RSS feeds. There were some canned options, none of which particularly interested me, but there was a search option for finding feeds. I cheated a bit, because I already knew most of the sites I wanted to access, but I have set up several feeds. I then discovered that Internet Explorer has a feed option. I went back, found several more sites, and can now access those through IE. Some of these should actually be useful in work. I did not add any of the feeds I was supposed to, and I am not going to like to feeds on other person's blogs. My interests are rather esoteric, and the blog linking is too voyeuristic for me.

I am wondering if these things are not just adding to the information overload problem. One could easily spend so much time looking for and reading information, that nothing else is accomplished in the course of the day. We all need information, but how much is enough? While I did find some feeds of interest and usefulness, how much of this do I really need to know to function at work and outside?