10 Ways to Know Everything
10 Ways to Know Everything
10 Ways to Know Everything
Looking for news that interests you is best compared to playing pool with a loose turd.
If there's one thing I realised in 2009 becoming a freelancer for the first time, it's that demands for News Now are greater than ever before.
I feel it. And so do you. It's not good enough to have yesterday's events delivered on sheets of paper, despite the best efforts of The Sun to compare its tree-destroying work to an iPhone.
Most of the time it's too laborious to even visit your favourite list of websites.
Finding the news that matters is like trying to sail the Atlantic on a boat made of feathers.
The semantic web (Web 3.0 if you're a ponce) will help change all this automatically. Through folksonomy and taxonomy (organising and tagging, for normal people). But we're not there yet.
So how do we revolutionise and streamline our information seeking behaviour in this time poor world of ours?
It's simple. We turn the wheel the other way and make the information come to us.
Here's your 10 for today:
10 ways to get it now:
Best for... Getting it.
1. RSS. People still don't get it. You probably do - but if you're only vaguely web-oriented (seriously, there are people who haven't heard of Facebook and they don't live in mental hospitals) then Really Simple Syndication is anything but. Thankfully it's easier than ever to subscribe to feeds from your favourite sites using that natty little orange symbol living in your address bar, or clicking the RSS link on sites that care. The curse here is information overload - like many geeks I have huge swathes of content flying into my Google Reader. But there are loads of ways to get what you want from what you've subscribed to. So long as you have the power to search (dead easy), organise (use folders) and trash (if you come back to 1000s of news items, can them and start afresh - once you've searched keywords that are most important to you to glean the few bits that matter right now) you can handle your RSS. Promise!
I'm not going to unduly confuse matters but the guy who 'created' - at least in part - RSS, Dave Winer, has come up with the goods for the next-gen RSS called River2. Don't worry yourself over this right now; in a nutshell it's a quicker way of having your stuff dished up. RSS will suffice until River2 is more widely acknowledged by the big boys.
If you hate Google because you're insecure about the safety of your personal information, and probably freak out when the concierge calls you by your first name after you've stayed at the same Travelodge nine times in the same month, then you can always point all your RSS feeds to a cool widget-style website called Netvibes instead.
RSS is the delivery mechanism. I'm gonna focus down below on the best ways to facilitate RSS...
Best for... Finding it.
2. Google News Custom Section. Newspapers on steroids - tailored to you, and in your face only when what you want is in the pipe. There's much more about this sacred
bit of kit here but in a nutshell what you're getting is the chance to choose all the keywords and phrases that matter to you in your daily life and build up an RSS feed that only features this stuff. It's like a newspaper built of pixels with your name in the masthead!
Best for... Bringing it all together.
3. Yahoo Pipes. If number 2 is web news on steroids, this is LSD. At it's easiest, it's an aggregator: it allows you to bring lots of RSS feeds together to be delivered from one single source. You can create a fix of every news story imaginable and have it shoehorned into a feed type of your choice (for RSS, while the popularest, isn't the only feed style available). Yahoo Pipes is so incredibly clever. But it also acts as a filter - you can screen feeds by keyword/location, for example, so if you have a news source feed that doesn't quite hit the spot for you, it can be refined by 'Pipes to give only what you want. Almost worth creating a Yahoo account for. Almost, as in 'you have to'.
Best for... Spying.
4. Gist. This is where I deviate from my customary tradition of recommending stuff I 'get'. So many people have yayed Gist I feel compelled to share it with you. Gist asks for your contacts stored across Twitter, Outlook, Facebook, LinkedIn etc and brings all the news together about them. So next time you talk you have everything you need to know at your fingertips. Outstanding in execution, they say. I installed the Gist plugin in MS Outlook and it doesn't seem to do anything. But I haven't toyed and the groundswell of public opinion suggests you should get it. Now. And Q - drop your poison-tipped umbrella in the uridium-lined locker on your way out.
Best for... Getting answers.
5. Hunch. Can't decide whether to dump him? Looking for a present for your friend with no legs? Hunch is here to help! Curates crowdsourcing tech to give you the ultimate answers to many of life's burning questions. Go through a simple process of multiple choice questions and find the answer that could quite literally change your life. Finally, question curation comes of age. After a bumpy start, Hunch is what it should be - a cure for indecision. Sadly, I couldn't find out whether Gloria Estefan walks around her house with no knickers on, but trainers aren't a good gift for Hopalong...
Best for... Showing off.
6. Google Ajax Feed. How to get your site visitors to read about your weird fetish for cow bells? It's easy! Google Ajax Feed presents your RSS feeds du jour in a stylish, disappeary tickertape-type panel of loveliness. I discovered this yesterday but soon as I get the chance to implement it on davethackeray.com I'll bang it in. I was looking to add a timeshare RSS feed for a client but all it spewed out was talk of Cialis so it needs a little tweaking, but if you want to run a feed on Paris Hilton's norks it should crank out little distractions.
Best for... Getting down with the kids.
7. Tweetdeck (or Seesmic). Manage your social media in one place. These web 'clients' (they run as programs rather than in your web browser) let you handle all your Twitter, Facebook (and in Tweetdeck's case, LinkedIn) status updates in a super-slick way. Run searches on keywords, hashtags and phrases popping up in Twitter, group your favourite Tweeps, auto-shorten URLs and drop pictures into your feeds. Both these babies run on Adobe Air framework which in English means they're damn quick. Having said that, if you want a website that does a similar (but not as good a) job you could always have a play with Hootsuite. Or Ping.fm if you want to simply update all your social media sites in one breath. But that's not 'get it' as much as 'give it'. Focus, DT.
Best for... Old school nu-news.
8. bbc.co.uk. If you still love the traditional website experience (am I really saying 'traditional' in this context? Outstanding! My god, I've just turned 156 years old in 5 years) then this is a better way to grab your brain biscuits than the average web window. You can personalise and tailor your BBC homepage by dragging and dropping the different sections where you want them. Newsvine is another great example of how this cute technology promises to revolutionise the internet experience. Of course you can do similar things using iGoogle but again, be wary since there's probably someone in a black Google bomber jacket in your kitchen inspecting your freezer contents as you're reading this.
Best for... Swimming through the news without drowning.
9. CNET River. I love blending stuff. I especially love Will It Blend? because it's the perfect example of a viral marketing campaign by a blender-making company. Kinda niche, huh? But the only place an iPhone really belongs is in the gnashing blades of a Blendtec appliance. My third-favourite example of blending (second is cocktail-making using as much Tequila as is humanly possible to consume) is the CNET River that mashes up the latest blogs, photo galleries, videos, and tweets from the company's editors to give you a holistic view of the news issues of the day. One place - lots of opinion.
Best for... Stupid stuff and pop culture.
10. Digg.com. Maybe I've a weird tingly thing for its founder Kevin Rose. I've been addicted to the vlog Diggnation since Jamaica 2007. I don't feel the same way about Alex Albrecht; I think it's the hair that's a turn-off. And his squeaky drawl. Digg invites users to submit content that others vote on. All categories
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