RSS
What is RSS and why is it important for time management?
RSS (most often the acronym for Really Simple Syndication but also occasionally Rich Site Summary) is the backbone of Web 2.0 technologies. The acceptance and growth of the internet has altered the way that we read, the way that we write, the way that we discuss and share information, and the way that we research and distribute information – and online practices commonly used today are very different to the traditional world of print.
Throughout our first semester I have been talking about ways for you to create content in relation to building your website or creating your blog…but today I will introduce you to RSS, essentially an efficient means of ‘keeping track’ and ‘keeping up’ with sites on the net that interest you and a fundamental way to consume web content.
You may have already found that once you begin to delve into blogs and changing sites that you find interesting, it rapidly becomes difficult to ‘keep up’ with everything that is happening on a daily basis. Reading all of this interesting content quickly becomes a somewhat daunting process. In pre-RSS days, you would have had to have visited every individual website or blog to discover or find any new content. RSS reverses this process – think of it as a flip. You don’t need to bookmark all of your favourite sites in folders and sub-folders in favourites on your desktop any more or trawl through your social bookmarks on delicious to find out what is new – with RSS new content is delivered directly to you via an RSS reading program known as a reader or an aggregator which allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds.
Using an RSS reader is an effective and efficient way to keep track of your research interests and more importantly, it is an extremely valuable time management tool. Both of the following articles were written in 2003 but the value of the message that they impart remains true to this day:
- Aggregators Attack Info Overload, written by Ryan Singel for Wired, makes the point (as can be deduced from the title of the article) that users are turning to the use of readers and aggregators to manage the information overload.
- RSS: Hot Fix for Info-Junkies (Growing Web standard makes it easy to get news on the topics you want), written by Eric Dahl for PC World, describes RSS as the “next Web-based time-saver”.
As an introduction to RSS, here is a great video RSS in Plain English produced by Commoncraft.
When you subscribe to a reader or aggregator, you will find that the interface is fairly similar to that of an email program – you can scan through each site/blog subscription quickly and read the posts/news/new content that you are interested in and those that are not of interest can be skipped and/or deleted. Best of all, most RSS readers are free to use and easy to learn. From your reader you will be able to subscribe to a range of feeds that interest you – right through from news to blogs, and from Flickr to podcasts.
Two of the major web based aggregators/readers are Google Reader and Bloglines. However, there are many other readers available – some other readers can be found here and Yahoo also offers a directory of readers. Web based readers are particularly useful because it means that you have access to your own personal media directory almost anywhere.
The introduction of RSS into our lives has had repercussions on how we create and consume media and our expectations for access and usability. RSS has enhanced the range and diversity of media products available on the web and also allows the consumer to easily select the material that they wish to read and access. As you might imagine, the implications of RSS and the public being able to control and shape their media consumption are enormous. However, there is still a percentage of the population who view Web 2.0 technologies, social networking, RSS and the blogging phenomenon as a threat to mainstream or ‘old’ media, rather than considering and embracing the possibilities that this new technology has to offer.
Other Life Hack Tips
Wikipedia describes Life Hack as:
‘..anything that solves an everyday problem in a clever or non-obvious way might be called a life hack. The term became popularized in the blogosphere and is primarily used by geeks who suffer from information overload or those with a playful curiosity in the ways they can accelerate their workflow.’
The blog Life Hacker assisted in popularizing the term Life Hack and Wikipedia covers the history of the term as ‘productivity tricks that programmers devise and employ to cut through information overload’ but the term has evolved to describe productivity tricks, tips for personal organization, and methods for efficient work processes.
The Life Hack tricks that we will discuss today (listed below) will assist you in your online working lives and may even make your University life easier as well…
Working within a web browser: the advantages
As students you are often working between stand alone computers (such as a laptop or your computer at home) and the networked computers on campus here at the university. You would be very familiar with the need to carry your work to and fro between the computer labs and your home on USB drives, CDs and other storage devices (eg: hard drive, zip drive, etc.)…but your digital life no longer has to be so complicated. Much of this tedious process can be avoided simply by working within a web browser.
Take for instance your theory essays and individual work proposals (IWPs), you do not need to carry a Microsoft Word file backwards and forwards between home and university any more – Google has developed online office tools in the form of Google Docs. With Google Docs you can easily create basic Word-style documents and spreadsheets from scratch and are able to perform tasks such as adding tables, inserting images, changing fonts, etc. – most of the commands that you would expect from Word itself. Google Docs is free and accepts most common file formats including DOC, RTF, PDF, HTML, etc. Some advantages to using this online software are that you can store and edit your work from any computer with an internet connection and a standard browser, the service is free and you are not required to install any software on your computer. The major disadvantages to working in this manner include depending on an online tool which may or may not operate 24/7 and being reliant on a service which may disappear. However, you can easily work around these disadvantages by keeping regular ‘back-ups’ of your work – which you would normally do in any case – so the inconvenience is minimal.
Another free, browser based office suite available is Zoho. Zoho offers word processing, presentation tools, spreadsheets, planning tools and note taking tools – all of which would be useful to you as students.
Note taking
In your day to day lives at university, and especially during the research phase in the lead up to essay writing, you would frequently have to take and store a variety of notes. There are free web applications that can help you to take and organize your notes, including:
Social Bookmarking
You will already be familiar with the notion of social bookmarking, having become accustomed to using del.icio.us, and you will become acquainted with accumulating a list of bookmarks that relate to your work throughout the course of this semester as part of the research for your presentation. It is for projects such as this, as well as for collating sites of interest, that social bookmarking becomes a very handy tool.
The video Social Bookmarking in Plain English, produced by Commoncraft, is a great introduction to this notion.
Aside from del.icio.us, another social bookmarking service that you might like to look at is Diigo (previously Furl). We also discussed Ma.gnolia last semester, however it has come to my attention that the public version of Ma.gnolia closed unexpectedly earlier this year – thus illustrating the major disadvantage of using such services.
Mind mapping tools
Creating mind maps/brainstorming is one technique commonly used to generate and develop ideas. This technique allows you to visualize concepts quickly and easily and mind maps can be used in the process of designing/developing a website, planning a project, sorting through your thoughts for writing an essay – whatever it is, a mind map helps you to clarify exactly what is what.
Bubbl.us is one example of a free web based mind mapping tool. It would be very easy to create an account on Bubbl.us and be mind mapping in less than 5 minutes – the interface is intuitive and can be understood quite easily if you are already familiar with the concept of mind mapping/brainstorming. After you have built a mind map on Bubbl.us, you have the option to save it for access at a later stage, share it with someone (you may wish to collaborate on a project) or export it as a jpeg file to be used elsewhere.
Other browser based mind mapping tools include:
*Note: You may wish, and I would encourage you, to look at using one of these web based mind mapping pieces of software for the mind map that I have asked you to create for your IWP.
To Do lists and Calendars
I can’t speak for you as individuals, but many designer-makers and artists that I know (myself included) live by To Do lists – if I didn’t, something would almost certainly drop off the plate (so to speak). Irrespective of your workshop or specialization, there is always a number of tasks that have to be completed in a certain order to actually design & make an object or to bring any project together. You might have to source materials, seek advice, do some research, contact companies to find out material specs, locate a variety of resources for your project, you will have a process to work through in order to make the object, you would probably like to document and photograph the process and the completed work, and if you are going to exhibit the project or work you will have another To Do list all over again! To complete many of these tasks you would often be using email, searching the web for resources and contacts, seeking addresses and phone numbers…and each task would need to be completed by a certain date.
It is all too easy to have odd documents (a page here and a page there) floating in your user space at university or living on your USB stick or hard drive at home, and invariably they manage to be misplaced or lost, written over or they are simply not where you want them when you need them – they’re at home on your home computer when you are at uni or they’re at Uni on your user space when you need them at home. It makes a lot of sense and is far more efficient to store them all in one place and online – this means that they will be accessible wherever you go so long as you have internet access and a standard browser. You would want to be using more than a simple note taking tool (as discussed above) for this type of activity, and this is where the free To Do list and Calendar web services come into their own.
A simple, free To Do list web application is Ta-da Lists produced by 37 Signals, who also produce Backpack (an intranet service for businesses).
There are a number of Calendar services online. Many people are beginning to use Google Calendar as it ties in nicely with the rest of the google apps and you can access it easily from the google apps space.
Another web based calendar service that you might wish to look could be Yahoo! Calendar.
Images
You can store images online using sites like Flickr, which we have discussed. Flickr is useful because you are not only storing your images online but you can also annotate and discuss your images as well as tag them so that they can be found easily and successfully by other users.
Another image hosting web service offered by Google is Picasa. Picasa offers 1GB of space for free before you need to pay to upgrade for more storage. Similar to Flickr, you can tag images and your viewers can leave comments, however there are fewer social features than Flickr – such as groups. Recently Google have doubled the size of the images you are able upload, from 10MB to 20MB per image, so now you can house quite large images on this site.
Personalised online start pages
If you begin to use (or already use) any or all of these online services, I would suggest that you might like to set up a personalised online start page for yourself with links to all of the sites that you use regularly. The following services usually offer a way to check your web-based email, check your RSS feed, search the web and access a variety of services like your del.icio.us account and Flickr account. Basically they put all of your daily information and needs in one place…a few you might consider could be:
- The start page service that Google offers
- Netvibes
- Pageflakes
Posted in Web 2.0
