Tuesday, April 17, 2007

RSS presentation by Steven Cohen

Liveblogging [additional notes added April 18/07]

He says he LOVES Google Reader for his RSS reader, much better than Bloglines. "Google Reader makes you smarter" - you feel like you are reading more.

You can share items with others, including those in Bloglines (not proprietary to Google).

Google Reader very intuitive, very easy to run. He uses it to teach RSS because it is easier to use.

Windows Vista has a "News" button that is really an RSS reader. Cool that they haven't referred to RSS; it doesn't matter what RSS stands for, it is what it does that is important. Call it news feeds, or whatever.

He doesn't browse the web any more - he reads:
- RSS
- Twitter
- email (and he doesn't get through his email)

LIBWORM is cool - David Rothman and developer Frankie Dolan created this site - searching only library feeds. He conducts a live search for CIL2007. Then you can throw the search into your Google Reader. [note corrected April 18/07 - Connie]

Page2 RSS - throw in a URL and create a feed for a site.

Techmeme - what is hot in the tech community

Justia - search U.S. court filings from PACER for free and create a feed for free. Woo hoo!

He puts Justia RSS feeds into Thunderbird - whenever a client gets sued in Federal Court, the attorney knows before the client does.

[additional notes added April 18/07 - I lost the live feed up to here:]

University Libraries RSS Feed - from the University of Oklahoma - cool!

LibraryThing – RSS feed so you can read when someone specific reviews books, lots of other types of feeds. Big on feeds.

Twitter! Blogging and social messaging on crack. He follows 77 people and 95 people follow him. Each page comes with a feed; every time he Twitters something, it comes up into the aggregator and reader.

However, stuff via RSS is going to appear in Twitter. What RSS to Twitter does – you sign into Twitter, you put in a feed, and any time that feed gets updated, it shows up on your page – automatically creates a title and a link.

“Twitter is like going into a room with all of your friends and saying something, and hoping someone listens to you.”

Tumblr http://tumblr.com - he uses it as his linkblog – if he finds something he wants to share with people; what he is doing, he shares photo, quote, link – going to update on his Tumblr page and it creates a feed. Similar to shared items on Google Reader. He can set it up as RSS to Twitter so that every time he links to something on Tumblr, it shows up on Twitter [geez, no wonder it looks like he is always on Twitter!!].

A colleague of his uses Twitter to document what research questions she has had.

Aggregators he has used:

Newscrawler – he wants it based out on the web

Bloglines – goes down too often for himself

Feed on Feeds http://www.stevencohen.info/feeds

He has fallen in love with Google Reader; however Twitter may soon take its place, may be the new reader. E.g. NY Times feed can be subscribed to in Twitter

His top 12 Really Cool Tools:
• Internet Archive http://www.archive.org
• Snapper – http://adonns.mozilla.org/firefox/2703 - allows you to capture just part of the screen as a screenshot and creates a .png file
• Browster – http://www.browster.com - slick! If you have it installed it opens up a little browser so you don’t have to leave your current browser; can make a tab of it and add it to your current browser. Google or Yahoo search – it will automatically cache first 10 results so pages load because they are preloaded – perfect for LEXISNEXIS – go through cases quickly
• BugMeNot
• TinyURL
• GoogleGroups
• Picnik http://www.picnik.com
• CiteBite – http://www.citebite.com - copy the piece of a website and the source URL, and it creates a cite, creates a unique URL – click on the URL, brings you to a cached page on the CiteBite site and highlights the part of the page you selected so you can show it to someone
• E-Bay for research – trademark, copyright – e.g. find Coca Cola bears – http://www.Missing-Auctions.com - allows you to search mispellings on e-Bay – if you don’t find what you need, try it out and you might find it.
• Twitter
• Meebo
• PBwiki

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ummmmm....who is "David Bigwood"?

Frankie Dolan and I created LibWorm.

If the "Bigwood" is a term of endearment, I can only question the tastefulness of it. ;)

Connie Crosby said...

LOL! Well, that is how I heard it but I was in the overflow room so likely I heard it wrong. I have corrected the note. ;-)

David said...

I figured it was something like that, Connie. No worries. ;)

Jamila Hanan said...

Thanks Connie - glad you like The Worm.
Frankie

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