Just a few really cool things you can do with some of the free web services (small w – not SOAP/XML/etc stuff, though that is sometimes involved) out there. And just as a disclaimer, I’m neither associated with nor cover any of the services mentioned below. I just happen to think they’re cool.
Use Social Bookmarking:
Many of you have probably read or heard of social bookmarking, or maybe you haven’t. Either way, many – most, actually – of the folks I speak to don’t see the value. So here are a few ways you can use http://del.icio.us:
1. See what the web is buzzing about: http://del.icio.us/popular
2. Research a topic – for example, privacy. Simply take your term and replace privacy: http://del.icio.us/tag/privacy
3. See what people who link to something you like, link to. After we both linked to Tomboy, I found that atariboy linked to things I was interested in: http://del.icio.us/atariboy. He found the link I describe in the next one. This works much better for niche or rare links.
4. Visualize the metadata topics you’re covering (see here)
5. Find new things via a simple tag. I subscribe, for example, to http://del.icio.us/tag/useful and often discover – go figure – useful things 😉
Alert Feeds in Bloglines:
Wish I could take credit for this one, but one of my readers (Vaibhav) put two and two together where I failed to. Basically you can sign up for a Google New Alert, as I outlined here. But instead of routing it to your regular email, you can push them over to Bloglines. How? Simply scroll to the bottom of your My Feeds tab in Bloglines, and hit “Create Email Subscription”. Then simply sign up to the alert with the email provided in your Bloglines email subscription. All of a sudden, your custom news alerts will show up in your Bloglines reader, rather than cluttering up your email box.
Use Social Photo Software:
Like social bookmarking, Flickr is a shared metadata service, but applied to photos rather than bookmarks. Sounds cool, but most people are sort of short on ideas of how to use it. I’m no expert – just getting use to it myself, but here’s a few ideas:
1. Subscribe to an RSS feed of your favorite sports team. Then, whenever someone takes a photo and puts it in Flickr with that metadata, you’ll see it. The Red Sox feed is as follows: http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=redsox&format=rss_200
2. Search the available tags here, and subscribe to a tag that interests you. Maybe it’s Ireland, maybe it’s cathedrals, maybe it’s dogs. Whatever. Point is, you can subscribe to it.
3. Create a private group, and share photos within it. Maybe it’s your group of friends, maybe it’s your project team.
4. Check out my photos – only a couple in there, but still: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sog/
5. Add photos to your blog here
Use Feedburner for Your Blog feed:
I was sort of put off by the idea of Feedburner at first, which is essentially that when people’s readers pick up your feed, you send them over to Feedburner to pick up an optimized version. It seemed cool because I’d get a better read of how many people were reading the blog, and what they were clicking on, but apart from that I didn’t see the value for the hassle. I was wrong. I’m now using Feedburner to splice in my del.icio.us links, meaning that those people picking up my blog feed are now able to see the links I’m reading every day as well. I could do photos as well – we’ll see about that. But it’s a very nice service – and the hassle? Couldn’t be easier. Anyone hosting on Apache just has to drop in a one line text file and you’re good to go.
