Bloglines? What?

So, I have done all of the reading in the activities section and then went to bloglines and completed most of the instructions. However, it would be nice for this lab and for many of the other labs to have an explanation of what we are signing up for and how to use the program. It seems like it is just assumed that we either (a) know what these programs are and how to use them or (b) have time to play around on them to figure them out. Neither of these is true for me. So here I am, at almost midnight, trying to figure out why I am signing up to have a ton more junk email sent to my email that I don't have time to read (my inbox is still flooded with emails from the listserver from Lab 1 or 2). Now, I am trying to figure out how to answer the questions about whether or not these "major news sites" (who is determining what is major and where do I find them) provide RSS and if so, which ones. Well, any logical person can figure out that the answer is yes, I just have to be able to tell which ones now. Which I might be able to do if I understood what RSS is, but since the reading on RSS was all in "techie" lingo, I still don't get it. I am looking on bloglines on what I think are news sites, but I can't tell because I have no clue what I am even looking at and I am not finding "sign up for RSS" on anything I look at. Who knows. Needless to say, I am incredibly frustrated with the vague instructions on many of the assignments for this class which greatly need to be updated (because of dead links and updated programs for which the instructions are no longer valid). I guess I could have saved all this for the end of the course survey or whatever, but afterall, this is a blog, and from what I have been reading, this is often what happens on blogs.

Anyway, I signed up for some school library stuff on bloglines. I took a look at some of the stuff. It looked like there were some interesting book reviews that I could have looked at. However, I didn't click "keep new" on each individual one, so now, I can't figure out how I can read what I have already looked at. Again, another frustration. Not to mention that I am not sure if I signed up for the right type of stuff. I mean, most of the stuff I signed up for are from School Library Journal, not someone's personal blogs, but I am not sure if I was supposed to do that or not, since I have no clue what bloglines even is.

Most of the blogs that we were to look at for the first part of the assignment were also very old and not updated very often or the links were dead links. Perhaps a new list would be appropriate there as well.