Today we examined different ways of utilising and organising social media/networking, as well as RSS feeds.
First, we looked at Google Reader, (www.google.co.uk/reader) which is quite useful and easy to access- you just need a google account. From there you can add RSS feeds from the websites you visit frequently (or not so frequently). It's just a simpler way to look at all the websites in one place, but you can sort it into categories if you find it easier to manage that way.
We then went onto Twitter, (www.twitter.com) looking at how to potentially increase followers, as well as finding interesting people to follow, for example through lists and followers of people we follow.
Delicious (www.delicious.com) is exciting (not to mention very useful), as it allows you to bookmark your sites in one place. Bookmarking sites on a laptop or personal computer is all very good, as long as you always use that one computer. Delicious allows you to access your bookmarked sites on whatever computer you're using, as long as it's connected to the internet. Just one username and password could save you from hours of re-searching for that really useful website you found. You can also view other people's bookmarks, in categorised lists: for example you could search 'lions' and then view websites about lions that other people have bookmarked.
Twitterfeed (www.twitterfeed.com) lets you post things you particularly find relevant from your RSS feed (for example on google reader) straight to your Twitter account. You can control this, on Google Reader there are various different categories or tags you can put your favourite pieces into and through twitterfeed control which of those goes to your Twitter.
Even though I frequently use a range of social media and networking etc, If This Then That (www.ifttt.com) is very exciting! It allows you to set certain actions to happen at certain times or when something else happens. I think perhaps the most useful bit is that you can set a certain action to happen at a certain time. For example, if you want to post a specific Tweet at 4pm every Tuesday, you can do that. Not sure how many people that would be useful for, but there seem to be a whole cavern worth of more features to explore when I have some spare time to see how I can utilise it best for me.
All these tools and new websites are good ways of managing all the information we get thrown at us every day, and quite vitally, a way to filter what we actually want to be seeing, which is personal for us. So on my Google Reader, I've got a lot of film magazines' websites, as well as the sort of news I'm interesting. It kind of reflects the people I follow on Twitter, but allows more content to be posted.
I'll probably spend some time in the near future looking at what's best for me, but maybe some of the web addresses will be forgotten by next week!
No comments:
Post a Comment