• information food chain
• information food chain
Posted by
kerrb
at
2005-01-13 07:30 PM
THE INFORMATION FOOD
CHAIN AND RSS SERVICES All of the services described in this article can be used without creating your own web site or blog. I’ve called it an ‘information food chain’ because information is produced, consumed, digested, manipulated, passed around, stored, retrieved and discarded. That’s a life cycle sort of approach. There are also the nutritional and emotional comparisons. Like food, information can be junk, high quality, delicious (pun intended – see below), mood altering, etc. I find it helpful to compare information, which is sometimes abstraction, with something concrete like food. There might be too much hype around about information (information superhighway, information age, etc.) but information, like food, is very important to us. If you are interested
in information then you need to know about RSS. RSS is information which travels around the Web that is structured in such a way that machines (computers and software) can read and manipulate it. RSS is a more intelligent sort of information container than the static, less flexible HTML information that has up until now has been predominant on the Web. HTML was designed to be simple and produce something to be read by people, rather than machines. Computers can extract more useful information out of RSS than from HTML. When that information is passed around between machines then useful trends and statistics can be collated. Once the software has been developed all this work is done by the computers so the process is fast. Various sites, some of which are discussed here, process and redistribute RSS information and you can use these services for your benefit. Some blog stats: (January 2005) Ø The number of weblogs has grown from 100,000 two years ago to around 5 million today. Ø A new weblog is created every 7.4 seconds, which means there are about 12,000 new blogs a day Ø There are about 275,000 blog posts daily, or about 10,800 blog updates an hour. source: http://www.technorati.com/about/ Ø 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online; and Ø 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs. Ø Still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is. source: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/144/report_display.asp RSS services which I
have examined (there are more): Blogdex, Delicious, Bloglines, Findory, Technorati Look at it like an
information food chain which harnesses the blog collective mind: 1) Web guides Millions of bloggers explore the Web and offer guidance, opinion etc. (blog software is a separate topic, although some of the services examined here do offer opportunity to create your own blog as well, eg. bloglines) 2 ) Broad Overview blogdex gives a broad overview of what is currently popular amongst the blog collective – it tracks the most contagious information currently spreading in the weblog community 3 ) Annotated references library de.licio.us – keep a personal annotated reference library of favourite articles, sites and blogs. You store the information in categories of your choice. This can be shared with others and / or fed to my own website in whole or organised by category. 4 ) Keeping up with it all bloglines - subscribe to RSS feeds of favourite blogs / sites through bloglines is a more focused and efficient way of keeping up with lots of information. More focused because the RSS feeds are all kept in one place. More efficient because the feeds are automatically updated so you know when a particular blog has a new post without visiting that blog. 5 ) Personalised newspaper findory personalised news - alternatively, create your own personalised news / web / blog paper at findory – just click on the items of interest and your homepage will progressively become more personalised – you can search as well as click and once again your homepage automatically changes to reflect your interests 6 ) The immediate conversation technorati – what is the blogosphere saying about the information that interests you? While browsing any web page, click the Technorati This favelet and it will show you what bloggers are saying about that page right now MORE DETAILS If information is important to you then you need to utilise some of these RSS services. Here are some more details: BLOGDEX This tracks the most contagious information currently spreading in the weblog community. I still have this as my home page despite all the competition! Why? Because it’s broadening to discover what others are interested in, not just search for news / information based on my interests DELICIOUS This is a social bookmarks service. del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others. Once setup it looks like this: http://del.icio.us/billKerr for all my references http://del.icio.us/billKerr/books
for books I’m interested in BLOGLINES For searching, subscribing, publishing and sharing news
feeds, blogs, and rich Web content. I’ve used it to subscribe to blogs that
interest me. You can see my bloglines blogroll at: http://www.bloglines.com/public/BillKerr So, all my blog feeds are in the one place, which is far easier to read and keep track of. Note that the feature showing how many items are read / unread is not displayed at the URL, so the service is even more useful when I log on into my personal account. FINDORY
TECHNORATI Favelets (Beta)Favelets (also known as Bookmarklets) are hyperlinks you can drag to your Links Toolbar that let you access Technorati from your browser, no matter what page you're viewing. Note: In some browsers, the Links Toolbar has another name. It's called "Favorites Bar" in IE/Mac, "Bookmarks Toolbar" in Firefox, and "Bookmarks Bar" in Safari. You can use the Technorati This favelet in three ways:
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Bill Kerr |