38. Feedhub

Feedhub, a recommendation engine for RSS feeds, may be just what you need to start really taking control of your information sources. Are your feed reader "unread" items a bit higher than you like? Feedhub can analyze what you are reading now and pull interesting and relevant stories out of the 'net just for you. The more you use it, the better it gets at figuring out what it is you like. You can also point it toward your FriendFeed or Delicious accounts or your blog to teach it more about what you are interested in. Once Feedhub does the analyzing of your interests, you will start to get stories in your feed reader that are tailored for you. Once that happens, you can pretty much delete most of your other feeds and rely on Feedhub to keep you informed.
I haven't been using it for very long, but it seems to do a pretty good job of figuring out what sort of news/stories/blog posts I will like from my feeds and delivering them to me. I'll keep tweaking the stories it sends (by going to the Feedhub site and "voting" on the stories it suggests for me) to make it work even better, though! What I'd really like is for it to pull stories from *other* feeds to show me that match the kinds of stories I like, as well.
This tool is another possible way to take control of your information sources and manage your time efficiently - use it if you feel like you want more control over the amount of information that comes at your via your feed reader!

37. Blip.tv

Most of you have heard of YouTube, but it's not the only place to watch videos online anymore, today we're going to look at one of the competitors blip.tv. Blip.tv is more focused towards videoblogging than viral videos.

Some of the benefits of blip.tv

• Doesn't lower the quality of your videos
• Free
• Works with multiple video formats
• Allows offers direct download links for all videos it hosts under Creative Commons
  

Links

• blip.tvs FAQ page
• MRRL's blip.tv account, we'll be using this to host George's and other videos

Other online video services

• Flickr - 90 second limit
• Vimeo
• Viddler
• Blogtv
• 12seconds.tv - you need a webcam and can only do 12second clips see my account

So you want to make your own videos? Here are some basic guides

• Lights! Camera! Vodcast!
• David Lee King's Videoblogging handout (pdf)
• Make Internet TV
  

36. Keeping things simple

Now that we are reaching the end of this set of lessons, you all have created accounts and played around with a *bunch* of different services in the Web 2.0 landscape. You may be wondering, at this point, how to keep up with updates to Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook and all the other sites that want you to keep them up-to-date with what you are doing. Using a social updating aggregator such as Updating.me, Ping.fm or Hellotxt will really help you out with this task. Any of these services will take your login information for a variety of sites and update them all in one fell swoop.
Updating.me offers one-stop updating for 10 different services, including Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Plurk and others that we haven't gotten around to mentioning yet. It also will show you a single page of your friends' updates from any of those services on it's home page as well, which is a feature that the other two don't have. Updating.me is still in beta, but the code BetaToUpdateMe

is currently working to get into it. If it stops working, let me know and I'll post the new one in a comment here.
Ping.fm offers many more services - it adds MySpace, Friendster, delicious, LinkedIn and more to the list of services that Updating.me offers and it offers more ways to update. You can send in your status via IM, Google Talk, email, and Facebook application, to name a few. Ping.fm just came out of private beta and will take anyone who wants to update a bunch of services using a bunch of possible methods.
Hellotxt is the third method that I've been known to use to update my status on various services. Hellotxt's strengths - and weaknesses - are it's international scope. Many services that are rarely used here in the states are represented in the list of possible services for hellotxt to update, but it also requires sending a text message to Italy if you want to update via your phone. Most "all-you-can-text" texting plans don't cover international texting - I know mine doesn't. Don't ask me how - it's embarrassing... Anyway, if you want to have an international presence in the social networking arena, hellotxt is a good option for you. It too is out of beta and will allow anyone to get an account.
For those of you who would like to keep your Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed and other social services' status messages in sync, one of these sites should give you the tools you need to make it happen. Do be careful about multiple updates, though. I had hellotxt set to update both Brightkite and Twitter, and then had my Brightkite service set to send any updates through that service on to Twitter. That caused a LOT of duplicate tweets until I finally noticed what I was doing. Again, embarrassing!

35. Time Management

One of the questions about the web I’m asked most often is - how do you find the time to keep up with everything? So I thought I'd share some tips and ask you for some tips. Here are mine:

• I don't try to keep up with everything. There is so much going on, I think it would be impossible to try to do it all and have a balanced life, so I accept that there will always be something I don’t know about.
• I have a great network of people; when I find something new I share, when they find something new they share
• I take what I like and throw the rest out. I’ll try most new services, set up an account, play with it for a while. If doesn’t click or do what I want, I stop using it.
• I don't use every tool everyday. Twitter is often overwhelming to me, and it interrupts me when I’m really focusing, so some days I don’t check in at all. I know I miss some good things, but it’s part of that “can’t do everything” acceptance.
• I’m organized - I use a feed reader and have over 10 folders. One titled daily - those are the blogs that have high priority, I don’t necessarily read them every day but if I have time they are the first ones that get read. This is a select folder and there are never more than 10 blogs in there. Other blogs are organized under subject. I try to read most of these once a week or so.
• I don’t try to do everything at once. First I got a Myspace page, mastered that (it took a while let me tell you and I cursed Myspace more than once) then I moved on to the next thing.
• I use gmail for my email list subscriptions, it groups emails together which makes is easy to follow conversations or delete the whole thread if I’m not interested. It also allows me to create custom labels (instead of folders) and sort incoming email by those and color code them!

Tools I use: a feed reader, blogs, email lists, FriendFeed, Facebook, Twitter, but use what works for you and you feel comfortable with.

What tips or tricks do you use for keeping up?

34 .Friendfeed Take 2 - the beta version

Bobbi mentioned the existence of a very cool lifestreaming application a while back called FriendFeed. Just last week, the fine folks behind this service released a "beta" (meaning not quite ready for everyone to use it) version of the new look/feel/features of the FriendFeed site and it is pretty amazing! You can now create lists and populate them with friends, work contacts, professional contacts or anything else you'd like and just view the feeds from the folks on a single list at one time. This is a great way to keep from being overwhelmed with information from your friends, collegues and co-workers all in the same "lifestream".
Also related to the friends lists, is a feature that wasn't advertised on the blog... It's called Fake Following. An excerpt from the TechCrunch post talking about the new feature says:

The Friend Lists also support “Fake Following” - a seemingly unintuitive feature that allows users to look like they’re following their friends without actually getting their updates. Users often expect to have their “Follows” reciprocated by their peers, and a failure to do so can lead to bruised egos. But indiscriminate following comes with a price too, as it ultimately leads to an unmanageable amount of noise (and stories you might not care about). Fake Following manages to skirt the issue with a digital white lie, and is a feature Twitter (which has a similar system) should offer too.

They have also improved the posting interface to allow easy posting of photos directly to FriendFeed. You can now post information about your life and include visual aids! They reworked the navigation to make FriendFeed rooms easier to find and manage - a nice touch to make getting around the site even easier. Finally (so far), they've also given us the ability to see another person's entire lifestream - their postings and all of their friends postings together - so that you can get a feel for what a particular person enjoys and/or finds interesting.
While the last option may seem to raise FriendFeed into the realm of a totally easy stalking tool, it also gives you a good bit of insight into your friends and allows you to find other friends very easily.
You can check out the new version by going to http://beta.friendfeed.com before it goes out, live, to all of the FriendFeed users. For those of you who decided not to join because it seemed too "noisy", you might want to take a second look - this new version is custom-made to make your FriendFeed experience as noisy or quiet as you want it to be!

32. Spam, Splogs and Blog Phishing

Web 1.0 gave us email - and all the spam we could stand to go with it. Web 2.0 gives us blogs - and comment spam, splogs and clever (and not-so-clever) blog phishing expeditions. While most of the time, spam is fairly harmless, it can also be used as a delivery mechanism for all kinds of nasty viruses and computer attacks. This lesson will give you a quick overview of the "2.0" spam that is out there and how to avoid it.
Comment Spam
This form of spam is basically a response to a blog post that either 1) has nothing to do with the post and is just a way for the commenter to get his URL out or 2) is a laundry list of links to porn, gambling, drug or malware (bad software that carries a virus) sites. Many of the more popular blogging platforms already do a pretty good job of screening out that kind of spam, but some will get through - just like email spam. You can set comments to moderated so that you have to approve all comments, but that is time-consuming for you and can put a damper on the conversation if people have to wait a while for their comments to show up. The "best practice" for blogs is to allow unmoderated comments, but pay attention to what is coming through and ruthlessly delete any that aren't on-topic and useful!
Splogs
Splogs are blogs that are in exist only to make their creator's some money. The creator "scrapes" other blogs for content - basically copying and pasting whatever is said on another blog to their blog (sometimes this can be automated) and sticking advertisments on it - hoping to get traffic that may have been headed to your blog to come to their blog instead - where they can then show them a bunch of ads and make some money! This is, of course, a violation of copyright, usually. Depending on the copyright license you choose (see the Creative Commons lesson earlier in the year for more on that), just attributing the post to you - and not all of them do that - is not enough for many licenses. Even if they do attribute, they aren't adding value, or ideas, just copying and nobody likes that. The bad news is that there isn't much you can do about them. You can complain to Blogger or Wordpress.com and get them shut down, but they'll be back very quickly. You can also take the fact that they are copying your work as a compliment. They wouldn't do it if they didn't think it would get them some traffic!
Blog Phishing
This is a fairly new phenomenon that puts links to phishing sites (see Wikipedia's definition of phishing if you aren't familiar with the term) into either your comment area of your blog, wiki or "comment wall" or into your referrer logs (the statistics that show who is linking to you and that some Web 2.0 services offer - such as Wordpress.com). These links will take you to a site that you may think is one thing, but is actually something far more malicious and dangerous.
Twitter Attacks
Recently, there was a news story on the BBC website that documented the first known Twitter attack. The account's profile link went to a site that attempted to download a fake version of Adobe's Flash player, which then went on to steal data off of your computer. Other Web 2.0 sites, most notably MySpace, have fallen victim to malicious profiles as well.
Protection
How do you protect yourself from all of these attacks? The easiest way is to use a browser or operating system (OS) that is more secure than the standard (Microsoft) options. The Firefox browser and the Linux, MacOS (based on Linux) operating systems are currently more secure than most versions of Microsoft's operating systems (including Vista and XP). Most of the security, however, comes from the fact that they are relatively unused and so virus/malware writers don't target them - the MS world is a much bigger target. Not all of us have the option of choosing our OS and browser, anyway, so if you have to use IE and XP or Vista, you can still take precautions.
Paying attention to what you are clicking is key - note whether the URL (the website's address) has funny characters (ones (1) instead of lowercase Ls (l) or zeros (0) instead of lowercase Os (o)) and be careful when clicking on URLs that are shortened with a service such as tinyurl or is.gd. Those URLs don't give any clues at all about what lies behind them! Make sure you know who is sending you a shortened URL before you click!!
For the spam issues, you can also use a good spam filter that is built into most blogging platforms to help cut down on the comment spam that you get. Wordpress uses the Akismet filter. I'm not sure what Blogger uses, but it isn't bad... This will help you keep the comment spam under control and your blog far more useful for both you and your readers!

31. Let's have a little fun this week!

There are a lot of free fun tools out there that let you play with your photos. Let's take a look at a couple. Up first from ALA create your own READ poster. You can upload your own photo and choose from 4 different layouts. You can seen some your coworkers have done on MRRL’s Flickr account. If you want me to add yours just email it to me, but you don't have to,.



Second is dumpr, which lets up insert a photo of you into a variety of different backgrounds and other cool things.



Last but hardly least, HeroMachine let's you create your own super hero. No skill with a pen or pencil required.


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Some other fun sites

• Fake Magazine Cover - fake magazine covers
• PhotoFunia - do cool effects with your photo
• MagMyPic - fake magazine covers