Thing 8 & 9
RSS feeds seem like they would be very useful. I was able to set up my own Bloglines news reader account and subscribe to some news feeds and some library things. I started to do this "Thing" a few days ago and it seemed very difficult, however once I sat down tonight and just got through it, it wasn't bad.
I also found Merlin and tried to subscribe to it, and it seemed like it worked, but when I clicked on it from the blogline, it didn't really have anything on it. I guess I will need to work on that some more.