Heidi Olson

In keeping with the tradition of giving thanks for the upcoming holiday, I’ve been thinking about what makes my work-life easier and how thankful I am for having such a tool to help me manage the tremendous amount of information that is out there. This tool would be my RSS feed aggregator! There are many of these types of tools available Google Reader, Netvibes, Newsgator, Blogbridge, and many more, but I’ve chosen to use Bloglines as the one place I can go and see what’s new in topics that are of interest to me.

My feed reader takes the RSS feeds that I subscribe to and keeps track of when something new is posted to that blog, wiki, discussion forum or website. Instead of having to visit each of these sites, I rely on Bloglines to keep track of that for me. I can go to one place on the web, browse through my list of subscriptions and make a choice on whether or not I want to see what’s new. I almost never have time to review all the new items in one sitting. I can quickly run through my list, select the ones that are most important at that time and read the headlines. There are certain subscriptions that I look at every day, sometimes more than once. But sometimes the number of new items grows until it looks even too large for me to look at; its too overwhelming. Then I simply clear them out and let the aggregator start over at 1. If I missed something I can always go back to the inital website and look for it. For example: I subscribed to several blogs that aggregate posts from other blogs on a similar topic. This syndicated blog might post twenty new items every day. If I miss one day of looking at the new posts then the number quickly adds up. Most often, out of the twenty posts there might be only one post that is actually meaningful to me. When the number grows too big I know I will never look at all of them so its just easier to clear it out. Its almost like all those boxes that I have in storage. There are things that have been there for about two years. Most likely I could just give the box away. I probably wouldn’t miss anything. And what a feeling of freedom that would be! (not too save a $$ savings!)

Also available is something called RSS-narrator, like TalkingNews which takes your text-only feeds and converts them to podcasts so you can listen to the articles on your ipod or other mp3 player. I haven’t tried this out but it seems like a pretty handy thing to have especially if you had a long commute to make each day.

For more information on RSS and Aggregators check out commoncraft.com for an easy to understand explantion on RSS.

List of Aggregators on Wikipedia

Comparision of Aggregators on Wikipedia

What’s your favorite digital tool that you give thanks for?

Extensions or Add-ons for the popular browser Firefox are being added every day. Many of these add-ons add functionality to enhance how you use the browser and are task specific. Some of my favorites include Colorful Tabs, Resizeable Text Area, and add to del.icio.us. These extensions allow me to visual, change, or quickly accomplish things I do on the internet.

I just ran across this add-on called Speed Dial that lets you see thumbnail views of multiple website on one page. Its like a visual bookmarking system, in a way. But if there are website that you go to everyday (or very often) this might be a quick way to see them. Of course, the most efficient method to see if there is new information being added to a website would be to subscribe to the websites’ RSS feed and refer to your RSS aggregator as a one-stop notification. Here’s a short video explaining what a RSS is and how to use it.

When you download Speed Dial to Firefox, a new button is placed on your toolbar and opens your speed dial page. There is also a drop down list that lets you select individual pages or groups and change the Speed Dial options.

Adding websites There are several ways to add websites to your speed dial: you can use the “Set as Speed Dial” option your bookmarks menu, or by right clicking on the website you want to add, or by editing the speed dial options.

Keyboard Shortcuts By pressing the “Control” key and a number you’ll access the website assigned to the Speed Dial entry with the same number in the current window. If you add the “Shift” key it will open in a new tab.

Groups You can set up your thumbnails into groups of websites to further define specific topics of websites.

I keep my UA resources in one group and the blogs and content areas I write to or monitor in another group. I could also see the use of using speed dial when I’m researching a topic and want to review and look back at multiple websites. Sometimes the names of the websites, since they might be similar, get confusing and a visual guide would be very handy.

I’ve been a fan of the commoncraft videos since I saw my first one about a year ago on RSS in Plain English. The videos they create are simple, clever, and short making them a great resource when you want to get a point across. Their newest one explains Online Photo Sharing through flickr. Others that might be of interest to you or to your students include:

• Blogs in Plain English
• Social Bookmarking in Plain English
• Social Networking in Plain English
• Wikis in Plain English