The First Time I Meta, My Mind Clouded Over

You will probably have already read my blog entry on RSS and information aggregation, and if you've ever used a search engine, you will know that finding the information you want can take some skill, knowledge and patience.
RSS feeds and aggregators can only go so far to address that, you still have to sift through the article titles and/or abstracts to find the article you wanted. What about if you munged all your feeds together, did a little analysis and then produced a list of the top keywords found in those feeds, highlighting any that appear most often. Well now you can, it's kind of a search engine come RSS feed aggregator, only you get to pick the feeds, and it's called Tag Cloud. It has been sparked by all the meta-data that RSS feeds contain, and also the 'tags' or labels that people have applied to their online photograph collections held on Flickr. You can find out more from the Wired News Service who've written a far more comprehensive article about Tag Cloud than mine. Having a Tag Cloud on your website or personal web space is said to be another tool for the emerging/emerged web folksonomies which include Flickr and de.licio.us - I'll probably write a little more about the latter later.
You can see an example cloud on http://soyouwantajobinit.blogspot.com/ , its cloud currently includes its own Atom (a type of RSS feed) and a recruitment company's feed for IT related jobs, you can also see one at the top of this weblog which features cross referenced content from most of my weblogs.
As always, comments and further information are welcome.

Plaxo - not a mouthwash (keeping your contacts, to-do and calendar in order)

Have you had e-mails from folks asking you to update your contact details by joining the hi-5 network, I have (and I daresay there are other similar offerings), usually from current and past students. What you might not know about this service is how it pollutes your privacy, here's how:

"Your friends automatically link with you when they join. They invite their friends and your close personal network grows. You can now safely meet new people through your friends network. " - Hi5 website tour of features

What this actually means is total strangers have access to your contact details, beats me why it's so popular.
Much more sensible, not to mention professional is Plaxo, not a mouthwash but a service which synchronises your contacts, to-do lists and calendar appointments with a web-based service meaning that if you're out and about mooching round the country (or world), you can readily access this information straight from a web-browser. What's more, connect your PC at home and you can automatically have that information appear on your home computer and vice versa. If that wasn't enough, make any changes and they're propogated straight away, make changes to your own contact details, and if any of your contacts are also Plaxo members, they get your updates without having to lift a finger - fantastic, if you change job say!
Doesn't this sound like a potential candidate for a corporate contacts folder which everyone has access to, and is connected via. Plaxo?

The software is currently free as an add-in for Microsoft Outlook, ask your friendly NBS IT team to install it for you if you are unable to do so yourself.

Feed yourself information and podcasts too!

I've got so much new stuff to tell you about, well not that new, but def. the way forward. First of all I need to get you up to speed on site feeds which is a special file used to describe website articles or content. You might have seen the following graphics on web-sites you visit (the BBC website has loads of site feeds and also offers a nice explanation of what they are).

(these are just some you might see)

You subscribe to these feeds either using a feed aggregator, this can simply be a web-based service, a standalone computer application such as Awasu, or an add-in for Microsoft Outlook such as Attensa (my favourite at the moment, if you don't have sufficient priviledges ask NBS IT to install it for you). Once subscribed, the aggregator simply delivers a synopsis of the web-site content direct to your desktop, multiple websites all in one place, no more will you have to keep visiting all your favourite websites (that should save you some time), see an article you like, click on it, and you're transported to the full article on the web-site.

Once I've got you up to speed on that, and hopefully using it, you might want to have a look at podcasts, there is an article on the BBC website which outlines what they are. They are essentially glorified feeds with audio add-ons to put it in lay-terms. Some educators have already started using them to supplement their teaching; think e-learning here folks, although this isn't an exclusive domain.

Just a taster of things to come, shortly....

Managing information effectively - part 1

You will probably have gathered from the verbatim at the top of this blog that I have issues with how information is disseminated in my workplace (I suspect we are not alone in this).



The following e-mail foibles really get my goat:

• Sending a list of dates for your diary - for gods sake, use the bloody software that you have been provided with otherwise my response is likely to be delete!
• Using e-mail for discussion - HELLO, web-logs now, pleeeeasee or at least use the voting buttons! Or if our IT dept enabled it, newsgroups in Outlook.
• Multiple file attachments - put it on the shared area, and if you must, announce it via e-mail.
• Sending a one liner with one single word attachment, please, either cut and paste the content or send it via. Words File menu, and use Send To, Mail Recipient (but not as an attachment).
• Don't fire off an immediate reply to a received e-mail, try and call first or drop by, remember, "it's good to talk"
• Expecting a reply immediately, would you expect a reply immediately from a letter sent by snail-mail? No? That's my point!

Blogs...

...that's what this is, a blog, or a web-log. You might have come across them before, then again you might not. What blogs allow you, or anyone with a computer and internet connection to do is to publish to a single page* website without having to know how to 'program' a web-page.
Push button publishing to the Internet.
I've been considering using it to add value to the modules I teach for a couple of years now, I've taken the plunge, and pulled in one or two unwilling 'volunteers' too, thankyou to Julia Vernon, Hayley Henderson, Rob Howe, Dinesh Parmar and Carole Morrell....oh and hopefully scores of students!
Want to find out more? Click on the title link to go directly to the blogger.com website. Want to see how my blogs are coming on?

Current blogs: INS1008, INS2013, INS2022 and of course the one you are now reading!

I would welcome your comments or questions to any of the articles posted on this blog, but NOT, I repeat NOT by e-mail --- get with the blogosphere!