Technology Never Ceases to Amaze Me

As part of Shimelle's "Blogging for Scrapbookers" class, she introduced us to Google Reader. I'd heard of it, but had never attempted to use it. I have about two dozen blogs that I follow regularly which I'd simply kept in a "favorites" list in IE. The same list is for the most part duplicated on my own blog in the Sidebar. Blog Hopping (which I do while eating breakfast, mainly to get more morning chuckle) meant signing onto IE - clicking through favorites, blogs, and clicking on an individual link, checking to see if anything new was posted, then going back up to favorites and clicking on the next link. Not exactly effiicient. With Google Reader you subscribe within the reader to all your blogs and then use the "next" function which clicks you through to each blog that has new content posted (conveniently skipping over all the ones with nothing new to say). No need to check them all! Here is what my Google Reader screen looks like:

Thanks to classmate Heather for compiling all of the blogs from the class members, I was able to pull in everything from the class in one folder and I now subscribe to 234 blogs! It is insane to think that I will be able to keep up with that many, so I'll be whittling the list down as class proceeds, deleting those that don't post and keeping those that catch my interest. But now I can see who has updated without clicking through a list of 234 links! yeah!

A funny thing happens as you are clicking the "next" button in Google Reader. It takes you through all the blogs in your subscription list that have updates. When you subscribe to 234 blogs, this can take quite awhile and if you have a life at all (which amazingly I do), you may find it difficult to get to the end of the updates. If you only had a dozen or so blogs to follow, I imagine getting to the end wouldn't be all that difficult. When you do finally get to the end of the updates and click next, here is what you get:

I admit this made me chuckle. Someone at Google really thinks they are clever. Especially since we all know there is NO "end" to the Internet. It is infinite - like the Universe. Isn't it? Go ponder that one for awhile. Hopefully I'll be back later today (or tomorrow) with some scrapbooking to show off.