So much information, so little time. Newspapers, magazines, podcasts, blog posts, books, webinars – we are overwhelmed with information from a myriad of sources. Most of us probably have our “towers of shame”, those stacks of must-read books beside the bed or our favorite chair.
How would you like to be served filtered business, local and news, blog posts, videos, and other items of interest, directly to your computer in real time? An extremely simple and efficient way to manage day to day information is through the use of an RSS reader and subscriptions to RSS feeds. RSS is Real Simple Syndication. Most dynamic web content, blog posts, news from online sources, is offered via RSS feeds, as indicated by the RSS symbol at the beginning of the paragraph or, or the symbol in conjunction with a Subscribe request near the top of many page . RSS and RSS feeds are a little hard to explain, so let’s get some help from Common Craft:
The use of RSS feeds will allow you to peruse a vast amount of information, in a shorter time. Continue reading →
[Delicious news -12/17/2010 – Yesterday rumors began to surface that Delicious owner,Yahoo!, was closing down this popular bookmarking site. Yahoo! finally release an explanation today as documented here. I will update as I get more information.]
We have all been bookmarking interesting websites in our browsers since we first discovered the Internet. There is always that URL you just know you will have to revisit or share in the future. As we poke our heads into the Cloud, we find online bookmarking platforms, like Google, that allow us to access our stuff wherever we are, plus share information in a public forum. The good folks at Common Craft explain the social bookmarking concept and introduce the best of all social bookmarking sites – Delicious:
Delicious offers benefits beyond online bookmarking with a useful social element that allows for tagging, commenting, indexing, archiving, and very simple sharing. we will just look at the basics. The easiest use of the site is through browser plug-ins like Share This or Google Chrome’s share button, or a bookmarklet from the Delicious site. When you find a website or blog post you want to bookmark, just click the button or link to activate Delicious:
You can add tags, and a description. The tags (keywords) you enter will help you find the articles later and share your public bookmarks with others. The URL structure looks like http://delicious.com/USERNAME/TAG, so you can share a link that that would take your reader to a list of the articles you have found on a certain subject. Here’s a real life example from my Delicious – http://delicious.com/joespake/realestate will take you to articles I have saved (bookmarked, clipped) about real estate. I can also generate an RSS feed for those articles which anyone can subscribe to to follow my recent updates.
Delicious is a useful tool at all levels – from saving your personal bookmarks, accessible from any computer, to more advanced curation, sharing and RSS feeds.
So much information, so little time. Newspapers, magazines, podcasts, blog posts, books, webinars – we are overwhelmed with information from a myriad of sources. Most of us probably have our “towers of shame”, those stacks of must-read books beside the bed or our favorite chair.
