A Pox on My Own Frustration Intolerance, and Kudos to Bloglines for Listening

The burn-out I mentioned in my last post showed in the sour title. Apologies for that (and shame on me–life’s too short for sourness). I did “breathe,” as Barbara advised in a comment, and sleep in Saturday. Mental hygiene seems about done; frustration tolerance, refueled.

Especially in light of the email I woke to from Bloglines this morning. I hope they won’t object to me posting it. It only seems fair to share this, since I didn’t spare them the “petulant frenzies,” to quote Zappa, of earlier posts.

Short version: Bloglines has done good. Here’s the message–quite gracious:

Hi
Thank you for your input in the [image feature] matter. We at Bloglines went
back and came up with a solution that I hope will still allow your
students to use Bloglines and not be exposed to adult content. Basically
we moved the [image feature] to a new domain [URL omitted] and
have contacted all the major 3rd party filter sites to add this domain
to their adult lists. More information can be found at
[URL omitted].

In either case, I’m sorry about how long it took for us to get matters
settled. I hope that this change may save you some of the hassle of
rebuilding your lesson plans, but I understand that your students do
come first. Thank you again for choosing Bloglines as your original
choice. I hope that you may come back to try our service as we roll out
new features in the future.

If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Best
[dloc]

So thanks to Miguel and everybody else who read my post and took action by going to the Bloglines forum and/or their own edublogs, and expressing their views. And thanks to Bloglines for problem-solving.

I said it earlier, and still find it true: for finding RSS feeds, Bloglines so far seems vastly superior to Google Reader (though GR is still in Beta). Their “find similar feeds,” “search for posts/feeds,” and other features are unmatched by Google Reader and Netvibes. (I will say that I like GR’s “tagging” system, and hope Bloglines adds this.) So I don’t know….

I may bring my students back to Bloglines. I may let them choose what reader to use. Again, I don’t know. The focus is supposed to be on locating, evaluating, and managing information, not comparing different web 2.0 services. It’s the literacy, not the technology. And all of this teapot tempest has distracted me and my students from that vital point.

But good on Bloglines for their solution.

Wait. I haven’t really checked it out. Is it a solution? What do you think?

Final thought: it’s interesting what a few people with a few blogs can do these days. In the last month, both ePals and Bloglines have listened to us bloggers and actually problem-solved with us. Sort of gives you hope, it does.

1. Update: Bloglines is Listening and Seeking Solutions
2. A Pox on Bloglines…and Google Reader
3. Eek: Researching with Web2.0 Tutorial Blizzard in Correct Order
4. 5 minute tutorial: tagged searches with Bloglines and del.icio.us

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