Tech Tools

1. Social Bookmarking: Delicious
Read this blog entry by David Lee King: http://www.davidleeking.com/2005/11/04/introduction-to-social-bookmarking/

  1. Start by browsing to del.icio.us. If you can't remember where the dots go in the URL, don't worry! You can now also use delicious.com.
  2. In the upper right hand corner, try typing something in the search box. For instance, try "Health statistics” or "Peanut Recall" and click "Search."
  3. Look at one of the results. The title is a link to the website that is bookmarked. After the title, there is a link that allows you to 'Save this' in your personal bookmarks. At the end of each record is a link that says "Saved by XX people." Click this link to see who else has bookmarked the site. In general, the higher the number of people who have saved a link is an indicator of a site's usefulness and relevance related to particular topic.
  4. After clicking the "Saved by" link, you will be looking at a list of users that have saved it, along with any notes they have written about the site in question. On the right side of the screen is a list of users that have bookmarked the site along with the link to the specific tags that describe similar sites in their collection. Click one of these tags to find other sites a person has decided are similar in scope.
  5. Sign up for an account on del.icio.us.
  6. Install the browser bookmark extension buttons for easy tagging of sites or viewing your saved favorites. See Del.icio.us Help >> Bookmarking >> select the appropriate extension for Firefox or IE.

2. Really Simple Syndication: RSS Feeds and Feed My Inbox

RSS Feeds
View RSS Feeds in Plain English: http://www.commoncraft.com/video/rss

Feed My Inbox
Interested in how RSS works, but don’t want to learn another program or sign up for something else. With Feed My Inbox, you can have RSS feeds sent directly to your email.

  1. Find a feed you want to subscribe to NYTimes.com Homepage RSS Feed
  2. Copy the http subscription code.
  3. Go to www.feedmyinbox.com , paste the code, and enter the email address you want the updates sent to.

3. Document Sharing: GoogleDocs

Create and share documents. GoogleDocs allows users to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations online. With GoogleDocs users can choose to keep work private or share it with specific people on a document by document basis. Start from scratch, use a template, or upload existing files (GoogleDoc supports most popular file formats, including DOC, XLS, ODT, ODS, RTF, CSV, PPT, etc).

Go to http://docs.google.com and “Take a Tour.”

  1. You will need to have created a Google account to use this feature. If you already have a Google account, go ahead and log in. Otherwise where it says “Don’t have a Google Account?” Click on “Get Started” (You can create a Google account using any email address; you do not have to set up Gmail or any other Google service).
  2. Begin a draft document.
  3. Once you have some content in your document, click on “Save.” (Upper right).
  4. Click on the “Share” Tab.
  5. In the text box for “Invite collaborators:” enter the email of your group partners and then click on Invite these people.
  6. Staff must open up their email and click on a link to accept the invitation to collaborate.

How to delete your Google account when you are done (if you want).

If you go to the main page for Google Documents after logging in, you should see “Settings” on the top. When you click on this, you should see: “Visit your Google Account settings to reset your password, change your security question, or learn about access to other Google services.” Click on “Google Account Settings.”

Next to “My Services” you should see “Edit.” This is where you can delete services



4. Customized Search Engine: Rollyo
Rollyo* is a Single Site Search released in 2005 by Yahoo that allows users to take up to 25 urls and create a search tool (what Rollyo calls a Searchroll) that searches only those domains either from websites or blogs, searched by Yahoo. Users can also share their "rolled" engines with other contributors, also HTML is available to post a mini search box to a user's website. You can edit and modify your Searchroll at any time.

Rollyo is a Single Site Search, which is particularly useful if you're always going back to the same sites over and over again like Dictionary.com, Amazon.com or Ebay.com you can create a searchroll that includes just that single site so all your searches are in one place. You can always expand any search to include the whole Web. With Rollyo you can search one site, the whole web, and everything in between. Remember, if the page hasn't been crawled by Yahoo, Rollyo will not find it.

  1. Go to the site, www.rollyo.com, and read “About Rollyo.”
  2. Try gathering 25 or fewer urls that contain content of interest that you search frequently and click save. It's that simple. There are no limitations about what you can create a specialized/target search tool about.
  3. Check out the Rollyo dashboard to see preselected choices.

5. Online Reference Management: Connotea & CiteUlike

Connotea
“Connotea, the Nature Publishing Group's answer to del.icio.us, is an online social bookmarking tool designed for researchers. Instead of managing general bookmarks, however, Connotea exists to manage references and collections of scientific articles. Because it is a social tool, the references that a Connotea user bookmarks are public and can be shared with colleagues and workgroups across the world.”  Read the rest of this review at: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2268226&tool=pmcentrez

CiteUlike
 Easily store references you find online  Discover new articles and resources    Share references with your peers Find out who's reading what you're reading  Store and search your PDFs

Go to www.citeulike.org
Browse the FAQs to understand how this site works.

6. Blog Directories: Technorati

Technorati was one of the first searchable blog directories available online, and it still reigns supreme - providing users with the ability to search blogs through a variety of search fields ranging from keywords to "authority," meaning how many people are referring to it.

7. Filtering Flickr
As you all know, sharing and tagging photos is one of the killer applications of web 2.0. Flickr can also be rather overwhelming when searching for that one right photo. Read: Newbie’s Guide to Flickr And How Nonprofits Can Get the Most out of Flickr

There are two sites that effectively and visually search FlickrCC and TagGalaxy .

8. Converters for Document Sharing
Share your documents with others; no worries on having the same applications.

Example: you need to convert a Power Point (PPT) file into PDF. Use the "Browse" button to locate the source file on your local PC, select it and click the "Convert" button. Done!

9. Online Chatting: Meebo
At meebo.com, millions of people every month keep in touch with friends on an any IM network (AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, Google Talk and Gmail, ICQ and Jabber) and chat with people in Meebo Rooms. Read the newspaper article: Meebo wants to get the Web chatting

10. Convert Any Document To Audio: iSpeech
*Note: This service offers a 15 day free trial, but is a pay service after that.
Convert webpages and documents to audio:

iSpeech will convert most webpages into audio and any uploaded document. Try it.

  1. Go to http://www.ispeech.org/convert.webpage.php
  2. Enter the URL of the web page you want to have read and iSpeech will convert it into audio you can listen to, share, embed or download.