Carol Blenkin asked: What are your essentials that you never miss looking at on a daily basis?

I tend to follow this routine, sometimes as often as a few times a day, time permitting:

1. check my bloglines aggregator

I scan the brief descriptions of the updated posts from over 40+ blog feeds.

Note to self (October 2009): This is why I have been thinking about spending more time developing a post summary to my posts, and will do so more mindfully in future - this is what shows up on the RSS aggregators' descriptions.

Note to self (March 2010): I have been reviewing tags, and have deleted two tags, and replaced the tag Glenn Groulx and MDDE691 with guest student blogging as this post is an exemplar I want to investigate further for a research paper.

I open the specific links to blogs, and then select the button "keep new" to keep the links to posts on my reader for ready access. Otherwise, the other blog posts are ignored and are deleted from the post results summary.

2. I open the email account to read up on the new edition OLDaily newsletter, which updates me on posts as filtered by Stephen Downes and George Siemens, two of the facilitators of the connectivism course I have been following as a lurker. This newsletter points to a number of excellent blogs, as well as Tweet (brief idea bursts using Twitter).

3. Check the Me2U community posts for recent activity from the 605 community and from my friends I have connected to. I know that the email updates are pretty good, and advise me of new posts and comments.