RSS Aggregator Tool Wanted

I'm back to work (unfortunately) - my holiday was fantastic! I've just managed to get to the bottom of my mailbox, which took me quite a while. Now I have to get updated about what else happened during my absense. I must admit that I'm quite disorganised in some things and one of them is tracking the blogs I like. There is a good tool that supports people like me getting organised: it's called RSS Feed and you surely all know what it is.

RSS stands for „Really Simple Syndication“. This is a RCT ("really clever technology") used by many blogs and other websites to allow readers to easily keep track of new and updated content. The site creates what’s known as a feed, which consists of headlines and summaries of new or updated articles. One advantage of RSS is that it saves you from regularly visiting your favourite sites to check for new content – if something has been changed, you’ll always know about it.
You can use an aggregator tool to combine the feeds from all your favourite sites. So it is a personalised newsletter delivering web contents to subscribers. When you subscribe to a site, you are actually telling your aggregator to make itself aware of any changes to that particular RSS feed. For easy consumption all the information you wish is presented in one screen.
One of my next tasks is to find a nice aggregator tool and put in all the sites I want to track. Any suggestions from your side? I haven't had time to do any research yet. Work is calling...
Have a sunny day,
Dania

Wikinomics - Society 2.0

You might already know that I'm heavily interested in Web 2.0. What I'm telling you now goes one step further. A few days ago I started reading this really inspiring book named "Wikinomics" by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams and must say that I'm fascinated by their views on the fundamental changes in our society.

They write about how the new web is revolutionising the economy and is reshaping organisations and workplaces in a profound way. We are shifting from closed and hierarchical workplaces to increasingly self-organized, distributed, and collaborative human capital networks. The world of open source software may have set the standard, but from this point forward the whole economy will run like that: An iterative and collaborative approach, rapid incremental innovation, over and over again. This new form of mass collaboration is known as peering. MySpace, Innocentive, Flickr, second life, YouTube, Linux, Wikipedia and the Human Genome Project are well-known examples of peer production.

Peer production describes what happens when masses of people and corporations collaborate openly to drive innovation and growth in their industries. Thousands of volunteers can create fast, fluid, efficient and and innovative projects involving little transaction cost, that outperform those of the largest and best-financed enterprises.

People participate in peer production communities for a wide range of intrinsic and self-interested reasons. People jump in for fun, altruism, to achieve something that is of direct value for them. They feel passionate about their particular area of expertise and enjoy creating something new or better.

Openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally: the future lies in collaboration across borders, cultures, companies, societies and disciplines. Anyone can plug and play. I love this approach and want to be part of it! Now I just have to set up my own collaboration project... I might be back with some further insights once I have finished the book :)

Dania

HTML for beginners

Behind the fancy exterior of blogs and other websites lies the source code of the page, making it look the way it does: a simple text document written in the programming language HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), which tells the Web browser how to display the text and images used on the page. Thanks to user-friendly blogging tools (such as WYSIWYG - What You See Is What You Get – more on this in a separate lesson) you don’t have to understand HTML in order to maintain the blog. If it was so you probably wouldn’t be reading anything from me ;)

HTML can be used to edit text, style, create lists, format your blog layout, etc. Any blog customisation will usually involve a change in the underlying HTML code.
HTML is based on tags. An open tag begins an instruction, a close tag ends it. For example putting the word “Dummy“ in between an open bold tag and a close bold tag will make the word bold on your post.

Lucky me that with Blogger I don’t need to use these tags to format the text of my posts – I just click the bold button and the bold tags are added in the background. Anyway, recently I looked at the HTML code in the background and noticed that it would be nice to at least be able to read the code a bit. Okay, I don’t want to push it too hard, but you can find some common tags in the box above in case you're interested.

I guess that’s enough for a real basic HTML lesson. If you now check your blog source code I hope you understand some of it... if you haven’t already been an HTML expert before this crash course!
Dania

WLAN on our patio

Good news: no need for me to post anymore from on old commodore64-like computer with a sticky keyboard and a really slow internet connection. I already tried out yesterday if there would be any wireless network available from our hotel room, but as I expected there wasn't. But surprise: today, sitting on the patio, all of sudden this promising message pops up telling me that a unsecured wireless network is available: Rancho Delfin. So here I am, sitting on the patio and surfing the web... thanks to Rancho Delfin, whoever and wherever you are!
Enough for today, I'm off - from websurfing to windsurfing :)
Have a great day, Dania

The rise of blogging

As I already mentioned last Friday, I’m on holiday! Goodbye Switzerland, hello Venezuela :) On the flight over I read in Jonathan Yang’s “The Rough Guide to Blogging” about the rise of blogging. Here a summary:

Before blogging became popular, personal homepages were the outlet of choice for individuals who wanted to create an online presence. Some homepages performed similar functions to today’s blogs, but the big difference was that the site’s owner needed to have at least a basic grasp of HTML to revise the homepage - more on HTML in one of my next posts, I promise :) That was a high enough barrier to put off most non-techies.

This all changed when easy-to-use blogging tools hit the scene: A blog could be updated from any computer without any specific programming knowledge. The first free publishing service was Pitas arising in July 1999, with Blogger and others following shortly after that. The first blog portal was created by Brigitte Eaton (www.eatonweb.com) to help readers find good blogs. Soon hundreds of thousands of blogs appeared. They were mostly by journal bloggers (writing about nothing more than the things going on in their lives: boring job, raising child etc.) and pundit bloggers (writing opinions about politics, movies, technology, world events and other specific subjects). These pundit bloggers served as hubs for communities of like-minded Internet users, before other specific communities existed.

By mid-2001 blogging as an activity was gaining momentum, but the public attention was still quite limited. This changed on September 11, 2001. The shock created an immediate demand for continuous coverage of the terrorist attacks and its consequences, which didn’t seem to be covered enough by the traditional media. The aftermath of the attacks pushed bloggers further into the spotlight, with “warblogs” discussing political and military developments.
With more and more professional and amateur pundits staking their claims online, politicians and media personalities suddenly had to deal with a new pack of independent watchdogs. The power of the pundit bloggers was remarkable.
As the new millennium rolled on, more different kind of people joined the blogosphere. Businesses started adding blogs to their websites to improve relations; consumer blogs started highlighting and reviewing products and so on. Blogging became the new bottom-up channel for distributing news and other information, challenging traditional media and influencing trends.
Now, by the beginning of 2007, even people like me are joining the blogosphere; posting entries from a really slow computer on the roof of our hotel in venezuela. Quite a cultural phenomenon, isn’t it?
Dania

From Flickr to Blogger

The Arenal Volcanic Plume, originally uploaded by Stuck in Customs.

I got a great tip from one of my contacts in MyBlogLog...thanks Billy! He said if I don't really feel like writing anything meaningful I should try to blog a picture. He also recommended this fantastic photographer: www.stuckincustoms.com.
So, just go to Flickr.com and register. Once you're registered you can simply choose a photo and blog it directly with the "blog this" icon. I won't explain all the steps inbetween because it is quite self-explanatory once you're on Flickr and because I decided to post this picture instead of a full article for some reason..
This picture was taken in Costa Rica and I chose it because I think it's just beautiful and it makes me get into the right holiday mood I need... On Monday I'm going windsurfing for two weeks to Venezuela, can't wait!

Get this widget now

Setting up a blog is similar to Jamie Oliver's cooking: get this widget over here, get that widget over there, mix it together and place it the way you like it... et voilà, ready is your blog! It's quite easy and still looks good.

Now what makes a widget a widget?
A widget is anything that can be embedded within a page of HTML, i.e. a web page. It adds some non-static content to that page. I guess the main characteristic making a widget a widget is the non-static content: The first widget I got was the one from MyBlogLog showing my recent readers. I'm proud to say that the content really hasn't been static since I implemented it, because more than 5 people read my blog so far. This widget has different pictures on it everyday without me doing anything - it's magic ;)

The magic works because applications can be integrated within any website by the placement of a small snippet of code. This has become a distribution or marketing channel for many companies. The code brings in ‘live’ content – advertisements, links, images – from a third party site without the web site owner having to update. Widgets can be written in HTML, but also in JavaScript, flash and other scripting languages that will be run when the page is called.

I added a new widget today, which shows the number of visitors on my blog. I hope it will be absolutely non-static and grow fast! I got it from http://www.widgetbox.com.

Although I like the idea of fun widgets on my blog, I think the comparison with cooking works again: to many ingredients can spoil the whole dish, so I'll try to select my widgets carefully!

Thanks for reading and have a great day, Dania

SNAP!

I discovered a great tool. Well, maybe it's not really right to say that I discovered it, because plenty of blogs and website already use this tool named "Snap Preview Anywhere": Since its introduction in November 2006, it has been adopted rapidly on more than 700,000 websites and continues to grow exponentially every day.

Here a short description: Snap Preview Anwhere is a free tool that lets any site owner add a previewing technology to their sites. When installed, every link on the site will show a preview of the linked site when a viewer hovers over the link. You can also turn the function off if it is starting to annoy you. This tool allows users to quickly decide if a site is really worth visiting before actually clicking on the link. To see how it works and to find out more about the company behind this tool, check out the icon and the link:

http://www.snap.com/about/about.php

I installed it yesterday on my blog and I think it is really cool :) Well, I guess I'm not the only one: Snap.com was chosen as one of TIME's magazine's 50 Coolest Websites of 2006 and Wordpress installed the previewing tool as a standard function on all wordpress-blogs. How long will it take until blogger follows?
Dania