2 posts tagged “rss”
Twitter. Flickr. Facebook. THE GPHONE! As everybody well knows, the current pile-up of web 2.0 services promising to revolutionize personal communication will settle into a virtual junk yard we'll laugh about years from now, if we even remember the names (Alas, poor Kozmo). Among the very few web 2.0 services used by the Hoole Intelligence Report, the awkwardly named del.icio.us is a jewel you really should consider trying.
del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service which allows you to store, organize, cross-reference, and share all the interesting stuff you find on the web. When you find a blog entry, magazine article, or site you like, you click the "post to del.icio.us" link on your bookmarks toolbar, which brings you to the del.icio.us site, where you can add a description to the bookmark and tags.
I tag my del.icio.us links with the key words that identify the content. I further organize my links by grouping them into "bundles" of related tags. In the main bookmark navigation pane, tags are grouped by bundle and appear in darker, bolder, larger type depending on how frequently they are used. In the capture on the right, you can see that "mobilebanking," a tag I frequently use, is a whopper, whereas "demography" is teeny and in a lighter font.
If you regularly use a particular tag like "puppies" to label bookmarks, you can click through that tag's link and see what other del.icio.us users who have an abiding interest in puppies have bookmarked. If you find a user who frequently bookmarks interesting content, you can set up del.icio.us to show you what they've added when you visit the site. I have the RSS feeds for a couple of people's del.icio.us selections hooked up to my Google Reader where any additions show up as headlines.
del.icio.us is loaded with subtle features that will aid avid web surfers and bloggers in their dorky pursuits. If you have a large collection of browser bookmarks, you can get started with the service by uploading them to del.icio.us, which will assign them tags based on your bookmark folder names. Firefox users (superior beasts, in case you were wondering) can download a slick del.icio.us toolbar, making the service that much easier to use. There are widgets available for Facebook and major blogging apps that display your latest del.icio.us links. For those with a couple of web surfing minutes to burn, you could do far worse than clicking the "popular" link at the upper right hand side of the main page, which represents the cream of the web at any given moment.
Mark me, dear Hoole Intelligence Report reader - all the brilliant, provocative scraps you come by on the web today will be displaced by equally interesting jibber jabber tomorrow. For me, del.icio.us is the tool that forms the web into an ongoing reference and a source of learning instead of a pleasant waste of time.
Lately, I've been on a quest to figure out what all this Web 2.0 business is about and make full use of it to improve the virtual part of my life. RSS is the talk of the town and the RSS icon shows up on just about every site I visit. The concept is simple enough -- you subscribe to an RSS feed for a site and content updates are delivered to you via an "aggregator" or "feed reader." What can be more daunting is figuring out how they get to you and where to view them once they do. This here is a primer on RSS feeds -- what they are and how to use them.
Like many web innovations, the exact origins of RSS are murky and hotly contested. The first time a web syndication format went by the initials RSS looks to be 1997. Back then, Netscape had developed a "Rich Site Summary" format that allowed it's users to enhance their "My Netscape" homepage with regularly updated data flows. After that, Netscape abandoned RSS and it was taken up by different developers with different agendas. By the time a single version -- RSS 2.0 -- rose to the top (there are at least six other formats still in use), RSS stood for "Really Simple Syndication."
For the user, RSS fundamentally changes the shape of the web. The typical routes to web content -- links, searches, bookmarks, e-mail updates -- tend to be inefficient, often leading to stale content, tedious detours, or dead ends. RSS offers a pipeline channeling new content from all the far-flung sites a user might be interested in directly to a single location on their desktop -- the aggregator.
Your Web, Delivered to You - I've looked into several aggregators including Bloglines and the one built into my Explorer browser, but the one that made RSS feeds practical for me is Google's Reader. To include a site on the reader, all I do is click the "Add Subscription" link and paste in the URL. By adding the Reader to my iGoogle desktop, I get updated content (podcasts, blog entries, del.icio.us link updates, anything really) from all my favorite sources in the form of headlines in a pane right along side my gmail, IM, weather forecast, calendar, etc. As with other Google apps, it's just as easy use the Reader from my PDA as from a desktop browser.
Personal Blogs sans Tedium - The idea of keeping up with people by reading their personal blog is great, but practically speaking, impossible. There's too many of them and who's got the time to read every bit of content on every one their friends' blogs? Using feeds, each new blog entry shows up on my Google Reader as a headline -- if it seems interesting or I have the time to read it, I can click through to the original article.
Reduce E-mail Clutter - feeds are rapidly replacing e-mail newsletters as a means of communication. This is great news for the individual web user, because you control the subscription (no more e-mail unsubscribe requests) and your e-mail inbox can be dedicated to communication that requires a response. According to Fast Company, the Union Bank of California has replaced broadcast e-mails with targeted RSS feeds based on job description and location, saving time and money.
The Hoole Intelligence Report enthusiastically advocates the use of RSS feeds as a way to make the web a richer, more efficient resource. If you haven't yet dived in, it goes without saying that subscribing to the Hoole Intelligence Report's RSS feed is the right place to start.
