Just a suggestion

When I moved into the corporate offices here in 1995, email was an afterthought. Chris Hendricks and I were the only people in the place who used it enough to care much about whether it worked, and it wasn't unusual for us to go a couple of days waiting for somebody in IT to fix it. Obviously, it took root, and an email outage now is treated like the phones being down.

I want to suggest a further iteration: that you need to get comfortable reading and managing blogs and other RSS feeds. It can be a pain, particularly if you oversubscribe or find the email notifications bothersome, but there is a hell of a lot of valuable information available that you won't get any other way.

My advice: find somebody at your place who knows the ropes and ask him or her to set you up with a user-friendly RSS reader -- one they can help you master. They come in all flavors – Windows, Mac, standalone, web-based, you-name-it. Find one you feel comfortable with and start slowly. Identify and use a few sources that are providing info you really care about. Try it for a month before you decide whether or not to stick with it.

Your "blogroll" – the list of blogs and feeds you monitor – will be different than mine. But you can look at mine and pick some blogs as starting points if you want at http://www.bloglines.com/blog/HowardWeaver

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