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3 Places to Discover New and Relevant Content

Dawn Foster — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:00:41 +0000

Web workers are a busy group, and it can be too easy to get buried in our work while rarely surfacing to keep up with the latest news, trends and other information that we should be learning. While I love my RSS reader and check it frequently, RSS readers have limitations. They are best for keeping up with information that you have added to your reader because you know you want to read it. What about all of that other information from sites that you don’t already read?

One of the best ways to find this news and interesting information is by using sites that provide smart ways to aggregate content. In some of these examples, the content is curated by real people, but in others, it’s generated algorithmically in that the posts being linked to or discussed rise to the top. Here are a few of my favorite ways to discover new and relevant content to get you started.

Techmeme

Techmeme is probably the most well-known way to find the hottest tech industry news. It uses a combination of human editorial input and algorithms to find the posts that people are talking about and linking to. My favorite thing about Techmeme is that it has an excerpt of the main story along with links to many of the other bloggers who are discussing the same topic. It’s easy to get a quick understanding of the story, while getting a look at how different people are reacting to the news. These reactions can be particularly fascinating for some of the more controversial stories. I use Techmeme to keep up with the news that all of the rest of the bloggers are discussing so that when I go out with my geeky friends in the evening, I’ll be ready to talk about the latest news.

The Twitter Tim.es

My new favorite content discovery site is The Twitter Tim.es because my personalized page is curated by the people that I choose to follow on Twitter. It takes the links posted by the people you follow and links from friends of friends, and puts them into a newspaper-style layout with the most frequently tweeted links at the top with larger headlines. Since I only follow people on Twitter that I really want to keep up with, the content that appears on my Twitter Tim.es page is highly relevant for me. It usually contains a mix of general technology information and Portland news, which is my perfect mix. You will need to sign into Twitter to create your pages, but as it uses oAuth to authenticate with Twitter you don’t have to give up your Twitter password.

Lazyfeed

I’ve just started using Lazyfeed, but it shows some real promise. You pick any topic that you want to learn about, and it provides real-time updates on the most recent content in your topic. It has a couple of features that make it particularly useful. First, it is really easy to add or delete topics, which makes it a great way to keep up with a hot topic temporarily (like a product launch) and then delete the topic after the buzz dies down. It also suggests related topics, which can be helpful when you are starting research on something new or to pull in some additional information.

What are your tips for discovering new and relevant content?

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Readtwit: Aggregate Links from Your Twitter Stream as RSS

Imran Ali — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 15:00:57 +0000

As Twitter continues to grow, many of us are using our network of friends as a filter for news. In many cases, those trusted relationships are beginning to displace RSS readers as news aggregation tools. Of the 280 or so people I’m currently following, most are personal connections or experts in their field.

My usual workflow involves following sources of news in both Twitter and Google Reader, from where I might retweet links or bookmark them in Delicious. I know merging my RSS sources into my Twitter stream would be too noisy, though I’ve often thought an RSS feed of links from Twitter would be something I would benefit from in my reader.

Enter Readtwit, a simple, free service with a singular purpose: to roll all of the links shared by the people you follow on Twitter into a single RSS feed.

Using Readtwit is simple:

Sign in with Twitter to register your account.
Give the service 15-20 seconds to scan through your recent Twitter stream.
Add the feed to your RSS reader (Google, Newsgator, Netvibes, Bloglines etc.)
Set up filters to exclude certain users’ links or remove particular hashtags from your feed.
Choose between summaries of articles or full stories, and set an update interval between 15 minutes and two hours.

Reedtwit helpfully expands shortened URLs to their original source, restoring some structural reliability to the real-time web.

I wasn’t sure if using something like Readtwit would simply duplicate information that was already readily available to me via other sources. However, I’m finding I like having a resilient RSS feed for what can sometimes be fleeting fragments of information that get lost in the noise of a Twitter stream.

Readtwit’s a great solution for those, like me, who are curating or following up on links from Twitter sources almost religiously. I’m not sure how sustainable Readtwit is without an obvious revenue stream — RSS ads in your stream, perhaps? — but for now I’m finding it to be a service I’m gaining value from every day.

How do you make sure you don’t miss any valuable links shared by your Twitter friends?

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VoxOx: Voice, Video, Texting and Instant Messaging In One Package

Charles Hamilton — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 22:30:39 +0000

I spend a lot of time each day communicating with colleagues and clients, by phone, email, on social networks, and via the occasional fax. But when I need to have a short conversation and get an answer right away, instant messaging is hard to beat. Unfortunately, there are several IM protocols, and most of them don’t talk to each other. That’s why I use the multi-protocol IM software Adium on the Mac and Pidgin on the PC. I can also use a web-based alternative like Meebo or the new Imo.im.

VoxOx wants to take multi-system communication several steps further. In addition to the various IM protocols, it supports social networks (Facebook, MySpace and Twitter); SMS texting; faxing; private email; file sharing; video conversations; and voice connections. VoxOx also supports Skype messaging, although you have to have the Skype software running, which sort of defeats its purpose.

When you sign up for the service, you are assigned a telephone number in southern California (other locations are apparently on the way). Incoming calls to that number, and voice conversations between you and other VoxOx users, are free; other calls are charged at rates similar to other VoIP services. VoxOx has just begun offering flat-fee voice and texting plans, at prices it claims are significantly cheaper than Skype’s. VoxOx’s other services are free.

In recent days, VoxOx has released beta 2.0.5. The software has improved since I first tried it a year or so ago, but it is very definitely still a work in progress. Its dark background with white text theme is hard on the eyes and isn’t editable, and its contact manager has no provision for importing from or syncing with other address books.

VoxOx seems to be trying to collect the useful features from Skype, conferencing services, virtual PBX services, instant messaging and file sharing services, and putting them all in one place. It’s a pretty cool idea, and VoxOx is definitely worth trying, but I’m not quite ready to make it part of my daily workflow yet.

Have you used VoxOx? What did you think of it?

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TweetAlert: Google Alerts on Twitter

Darrell Etherington — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:00:17 +0000

I used to use Google Alerts all the time to keep me apprised of what was going on in the world of Apple tech, for another gig I have writing online. It was a great solution, but eventually, Twitter’s real-time information flow became much more useful for me.

But the problem with Twitter is that it’s kind of unwieldy. I follow a lot of people, and even though I have multiple accounts to follow different groups of people, a lot gets lost in the stream. Twitter clients with built-in search help, but at a glance, Google Alert-like results would be ideal. Thankfully, there’s a service that does almost precisely that. It’s called TweetAlert.

At first glance, it seemed to me like a way to quickly and easily create your own spam bot, which obviously isn’t something I’d be interested in doing. Upon closer inspection, though, it actually offers a very manageable and unobtrusive way to create a tweet stream with a razor-sharp focus that should prove much more effective than the catch-all net fishing that is Twitter search.

What TweetAlert does is retweet any status update it finds that contains a hashtag of your choosing. For example, you could use #apple, and it would automatically search and retweet any post containing that variable using the account you register with the service. Obviously, you don’t want to use your main account for this otherwise you’ll end up spamming all of your followers; TweetAlert recommends that you create a new account specifically for this purpose.

Once you’ve created an account and set it up on TweetAlert, you can use it in two ways. First, you can follow that account with your main identity to keep on top of that topic. This is especially handy if an account on TweetAlert already exists looking for the same thing you are, so you don’t have to set up a new one. I’m more interested in the second use, which is to add the new account you create to your Twitter client of choice. That way, it’s a simple matter of viewing its timeline whenever you want to check your results, all in one place and without any static from your regular account.

Is it a perfect solution? No, but TweetAlert does go out of its way to make sure it isn’t being too spammy. When it retweets the updates it finds, it changes the hashtag to avoid clogging up regular Twitter search results. That means it isn’t particularly pretty to look at, but it could help you catch something important to your work that you would otherwise have missed entirely, and that’s nothing to sneeze at.

Are you using TweetAlert? Share your thoughts on the service below.

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Is Twitter Replacing the RSS Reader?

Dawn Foster — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:00:55 +0000

Last Friday, I was attending Portland’s weekly Beer and Blog event, and I stumbled across what later turned out to be an interesting trend. I had two separate, unrelated conversations about an hour apart with people working in the technology industry who once used RSS readers but had mostly abandoned them in favor of using Twitter to find news and interesting blog posts. I talked to a couple of other friends and posted the question on Twitter, which confirmed that many people are using Twitter as an RSS reader replacement.

One of the people that I talked to at Beer and Blog was Jason Mauer, Senior Developer Evangelist for Microsoft and @jasonmauer on Twitter; he says:

“I follow Twitter for the conversation anyway, and have found it’s mostly duplicative to also follow the blog feeds of people I’m already following on Twitter. If they post something, I’ll usually hear about it in a tweet.

Where Twitter really pays off is through the power of social networking — interesting content surfaces naturally from people’s recommendations. I might not know that blogger at all who just wrote a really great post, but I’ll hear about it via retweeting. People I follow deliver content piping hot right to my desk. And unlike RSS, Twitter is two-way — the discussion is right there. I get more bang for the buck spending the precious resource that is attention on Twitter than on an RSS reader, which feels like a chore in comparison.”

Mike McClure, strategy and governance consultant and @mcclure on Twitter, says:

“I use twitter in lieu of an RSS reader for productivity and efficiency reasons. All but one of my news sites make announcements on Twitter anyway, so I don’t need to check yet another news source. If the news is big enough, it’ll be circulated enough that I’ll find out soon enough anyway. I’m an analyst not a reporter, so being first to see the news is less important to me than seeing a broad set of thoughts and opinions about the same news.

For real-time information there’s Twitter, for everything else there’s Google.”

McClure also mentioned that Twitter lists might make it even easier to use Twitter to keep up on news, since you can categorize groups of Twitter accounts to create news lists for even easier access to news feeds on Twitter.

These conversations got me thinking about how my use of RSS readers has changed. I am still an obsessive user of RSS, but the feeds that I check most often aren’t news related. I have feeds for Yahoo Pipes that track mentions of all my various projects, clients and other important information, and I regularly read feeds that have unique content that I wouldn’t otherwise find (web comics, niche blogs, online community content, etc.) However, I read my news feeds or mainstream blog feeds much less often than before. Most of the news that I would get from technology blogs has already been discussed and linked on Twitter by the time I get to it in my RSS reader, so I rarely need to read my news feeds.

The feedback on Twitter (as Twitter doesn’t store tweets indefinitely this link may not work in the future) shows that many people are replacing RSS readers with Twitter, but that doesn’t tell the entire story.

As you can see, quite a few people have reduced their use of RSS readers, but like most trends, it isn’t universal. There are plenty of people — like me — who still use RSS readers for some feeds, but there are other people who have actually increased their RSS reading as a result of Twitter. The increased usage seems to fall into two categories: People who read Twitter in their RSS reader, and people who run across new things that they then add to their RSS reader.

Has Twitter changed the way you use an RSS reader?

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Google Fast Flip: Internet Research Gets a New Look

Darrell Etherington — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:00:29 +0000

It seems to be new Google features discovery week, with new search parameters for searching the web in real time, and now a Labs feature called Fast Flip making an appearance. Fast Flip is a visual browser of online publications, designed to give you a quick snapshot of what’s being blogged and talked about at many major news sources at a glance.

If you’re looking to take the pulse of the web at any given moment (and you don’t want the static or excess sensationalism that goes along with using Twitter), Google Fast Flip is as good a place as any to start. It sort of feels like a concise, pre-filtered Alltop that provides a macro level view of some of the web’s most influential and respectable news sources.

Current sources include Esquire, BBC News, the New York Times, TechCrunch, and Salon.com, in addition to about 35 other magazine, news and general information sites that receive regular updates. You can browse all of these by popularity, by subsection, by topic, or by source using Google’s new visual interface that works a little like Apple’s Cover Flow technology. Each site is represented by an image capture of the relevant page.

Clicking through to a source doesn’t actually bring you to the site in question, as I would’ve initially guessed. It actually opened up the relevant article in a reading interface, but doesn’t redirect away from Google Fast Flip. The reader view gives you a set portion of the article viewed as an image file, the idea being that you can see a quick preview before clicking through to the full story at the site itself. It sort of feels like searching through microfiche in the basement of the local library.

Arrows at the side of the image in reader view allow you to browse other stories in the category you’ve chosen, and an expandable tray allows you access to the thumbnails of all the stories in that series. You can also email and “Like” any story you find, which requires sign-in with your Google credentials.

Is it useful? Speaking as someone who depends on the Internet news media for my online career, I think it may be. It’s a great way to see what the major outlets are talking about all at once, without having to visit each individually. I can see people arguing that an RSS reader does the same job without as much distracting visual flair, but for people who process information visually, Fast Flip might prove more effective or more comfortable overall.

Do you think Google Fast Flip will catch on as a search tool? Do you see yourself using it over something like Alltop or RSS?

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Midweek Miscellany: 3 Free Useful Tools

Darrell Etherington — Wed, 27 May 2009 14:00:48 +0000

Generally speaking, when I’m sharing recently discovered web tools, I try to organize them along a common theme, or a goal that they can be used to achieve. This time around, I just wanted to share three somewhat unusual, but genuinely useful, web tools with you. Trying to fit them into a specific theme or goal would only detract from their myriad possible applications, so without further ado, here they are:

printfriendly — Make Any Site Printer-Friendly

Many sites nowadays will have a “printer-friendly” button, which often just strips the web page of any fancy CSS and gives you a bare-bones text document that won’t eat up too much of your precious ink or toner. I know that for all the recent web site work I’ve done for clients, I always make sure to include just such a version. Unfortunately, not everyone does the same.
For those times when the button is missing, and printing the web page with images, etc., would result in too much of a dent in your ink supplies, there’s printfriendly. All you have to do is enter any URL into the field on its main page, and you immediately get a stripped-down version which you can then print or save as a PDF. Webmasters can also get the code for a printfriendly button to use on their own site, so that they don’t have to code a printer-friendly version for themselves.

Geek Chart — Show Off Where You Share Stuff Online

Ever wonder whether you share more stuff on Twitter, YouTube, Flickr or your blog? Geek Chart can help you find out, and then display that info to others in an attractive, easy-to-read pie chart format. Just enter your information for the relevant networks you want to measure (Facebook is unfortunately not yet available), and Geek Chart generates a color-coded pie that shows how much data you have associated with each account.

Mine is currently heavily skewed towards Twitter, but that’s because if you read the fine print, it only takes into consideration your last 30 days of activity. If you spend a lot of time on your social network content, this might be a great way to show visitors to your own page exactly where your attention lies, and what might therefore be the best way to reach you.

trackle — Track Anything, Anywhere on the Web

Google Alerts are a great way to stay up to date with a favorite subject or news category. I have a variety of both blog and news alerts set up so that I receive regular notifications via email when something noteworthy goes on in my areas of interest. Trackle aims to do the same thing, but adds more oomph than Google Alerts is currently capable of.

For example, you can keep abreast of crime in your own neighborhood, or job postings, or even your own web presence (good for those of us who make our business here). Through trackle, you create “tracklets”, or customized web crawlers that return custom information to you based on criteria you specify.

There are tons of pre-made tracklets available to choose from, and you can receive alerts in a number of different ways, including via web through trackle’s own interface, through your phone via SMS, or through email. Also, you can specify the frequency with which you receive updates, and choose to either get them as they occur, or as a collected package once daily.

These tools may not be particularly powerful, nor do they provide any kind of revolutionary service. They do, however, perform small, potentially useful tasks well, and they’re free, which is more than reason enough to consider adding them to your toolbox.

Found any cool tools recently? Let us know in the comments.

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Google News Goes Local, Finally

Jason Harris — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:00:34 +0000

In a move that is sure to strike fear in the heart of local news providers such as your newspaper or TV affiliate, Google News has added the ability to see local news based on your location.

Here’s how it works: simply go to Google News, look half way down the page you’ll see a text box allowing you to enter either a zip code or city/state. Do so and Google News will reload with your local city listed as one of the categories of news available for your reading pleasure. Aggregating local news stories from a variety of sources is nothing new for Google News, but this is the first time we have been able to see a specific city’s news items as a news category.

One obvious missing feature is the ability to search the local view. If you do enter a search term, you see the global search results. Additionally, at this point in time the local news feature only works in the United States and only in English.

Google may make a splash, but their not the first

Google joins a competitive space. Yahoo! News has had local news in Beta status for some time. To it’s credit, Yahoo! News is more pleasing to the eye when compared Google News. It cleanly breaks up news content based on originating source and allows easy access to local video reports. Additionally, Yahoo! leverages it’s assets by displaying user submitted photos for the area that reside on Flickr.

Similar to Google News, Yahoo! news does not enable you to search the local sources and retrieve results based on your geography. Google’s local news offering delivers local news from many more areas as Yahoo has not expanded it’s service beyond major metro areas.

MSNBC‘s offering is even more limited than that of Google or Yahoo!. After being prompted for your zip code, MSNBC’s home page displays a paltry 3 or 4 stories and your local weather provided by the Weather Channel. An individual city’s news page requires massive amount of scrolling and, as expected, shows a few stories from local news sources including newspapers and local TV affiliates’ news departments. Again, leveraging their assets, MSN displays a Virtual Earth map showing local traffic, a view of local company’s stock activity, local sports scores, and lottery results. To my surprise, MSNBC adds a unique view into local blog scene by featuring recent posts from local blogs. As with Yahoo! and Google, no local search is supported.

Topix is a winner in the news aggregation scene and is sure to feel some pressure from Google’s News’ newest feature. Topix’s claim to fame is mixing traditional media with citizen journalists. Topix presents a well laid out website with main news stories dominating the page with weather, traffic, and a poll appearing on the page. Like Google News, Topix pulls from numerous sites. Their tagline on their site is “Local news continually updated from thousands of sources on the web”. Topix has developed a strong audience by delivering pertinent information to a local audience. Each article has “Related Topix” that give a tagsonomy to the website and creating linkage to each article. Topix, like Google News, features many geographic area because of the reach of it’s new sources.

Conclusion

Google’s local news service has a massive amount of potential and represents a fantastic way to stay up to date on news in a geographic area. However it’s clear that if they utilize other components of their online offerings, Google’s local news sites would be more valuable for users. For example: offer Google Maps with it’s easy to use Traffic view, embed Picasa photos that have been tagged or geo-tagged with the known local city name, and offer blog posts that have been discovered by Google Blog Search.

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