New tools 11 January 2010

Huskies pulling sledge
Originally uploaded by State Library of New South Wales collection

The next blog post about web 2.0 tools will be 11 January 2010.

This gives you the opportunity to catch up, or have a break. Let us know, in the comments, any web 2.0 tools you would like to find out more about.

Ellen and Mylee

Event management

Using lots of web 2.0 tools takes careful scheduling, so you might like to try some of the event management tools which are available.

Doodle
Doodle allows you to work out when to schedule a meeting.  You set up a doodle, then fill in the available times, you e-mail it to the people you want to meet with.  They fill in their times. A quick glance will then let you know what time the meeting can be held. 

Set up a meeting with doodle and send and invite to nswpln@gmail.com

Google calendar 
Google calendar can be accessed using your gmail account.  It works like other online calendars, where you fill in the details of meetings.  It can  be accessed in offline mode as well.

You might like to have a look at the getting started information.

Try it out.  Add nswpln@gmail.com as a friend to your calendar and see what we have planned for this week.

Event brite
Eventbrite is a helpful tool for when you want to take bookings for events. You can see an example of it here.
You might want to create a free account and try it out.

There are other tools which are similar like  Eventful and Anyvite

Blog points
Which of these tools did you like the best?

What did you like about them?

Productivity : more ways with rss

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a great tool for keeping up with professional or personal interests. Subscribing to blogs, news sites, and more and having the updates fed to you saves time. Here are some tools that can help make your RSS use more efficient and useful.

Alerts
Set up alerts.  There may be things which you want to find out about on a regular basis, it could be a subject of interest, or you might want to find out what people are saying about your organisation or town.  You can use Google alerts to have specific searches of interest repeated over and over again.

You can obtain information the topic you wish to monitor and receive by e-mail or rss feed.  Note to receive the alert by rss feed you will have to edit your alter once you have set it up.

Try setting up an alert.

Filter Your RSS
Filtering allows you to focus on those items you are most interested and eliminate a lot of the noise that accumulates in your reader. These services will reduce the number of posts you get based on by tag, keyword, or other parameters you set.
FeedRinse
FilterMyRSS
FeedSifter-filters in by keyword

You can have your rss feeds sent to a variety of places
FeedMyInbox--Forward to email
Spoken Text--Text to speech RSS
RSS to Twitter--Send RSS feed to Twitter 

Be More Efficient with RSS
Beyond reading blogs and news, you can use RSS for keeping up on other things:

ReminderFeed--Send reminder messages to your RSS


Share Your Feeds
RSS has become more social. Google Reader lets you recommend or share feeds with others. Another way to share is to publish/print your feeds using a site like Tabbloid.


   1. How have you been using your RSS reader? Do you read it regularly?
   2. How have you organized your feeds? Does that help you keep up?
   3. Which of the above tools did you try?  What did you like about them?