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"Keeping abreast of news in your niche can be tough. I know the feeling of being left behind, when you think you need to be checking thousands of feeds 24 hours a day. Fact is you do not need to have such a punishing regime. I have been known to follow stupidly excessive amounts of RSS feeds, plus my Twitter following got well out of hand. My feeds are now down to 300 and I am slowly trimming who I follow on Twitter. I'm down from 900 and some to hopefully approaching a manageable number below 700. This might still seem like a lot to you, how do I manage to follow so many feeds? Here are 21 tips for a more productive approach to keeping up with all the crucial developments in your niche. They will work for feeds or Twitter in most cases but I have aimed mainly at RSS:"

Rolling Your Own Newsroom by Robert Passarella Financial professionals by their very nature are news junkies. I've always enjoyed building my own quick tools to parse information and share it with my co-workers, friends, and family. When I was at Bear Stearns I built a few subject-related iGoogle tabs and shared them with clients or co-workers. I looked at these tools as the poor man's version of Bloomberg, since you could cobble together Yahoo or Google finance data with news feeds to make a focused custom page. Recently my friends and family were asking me how to keep track of the "Wall Street Crisis." I gave them sites and feeds--but they kept asking me for what I was reading. I spend a considerable amount of time reading, watching, and listening to news all day long. I email, Twitter, and forward links and stories throughout the day. So in essence, I am my own news editor. I enjoy tools like Snackr (thanks Marshall) which allows me to have a real time ticker-like interface for my feeds, and digg the giant social news filter. But one of the key tools I love to use is Google's Reader.

How to Hack Together a Twitter Client Guy Kawasaki of How to Change the WorldGuy Kawasaki of How to Change the World | May 4th, 2009 - 03:57 PM (89) found this useful. Do you? Yes NNW.jpg Sometimes you can make do with what's available. Take, for example, Twitter clients. Until someone creates my fantasy Twitter client, I am using an application that doesn't have "Tw" anywhere in its name or heritage. It's called NetNewsWire. This is bizarre because NetNewsWire is a RSS reader. Its purpose is to aggregate news feeds from websites and blogs. (Ironically, my company, Alltop, is in the business of making RSS readers unnecessary, but that's another story.) Using NetNewsWire for Twitter is like using a Toyota Prius as a taxi cab: it makes sense because of the Prius's great mileage, but I doubt that Toyota planned it this way or optimized Prius for this purpose.

"Networks grow from separate nodes, to a hierarchical organization where one node manages the connections, but the true power of a network is unleashed when every node knows what the goal is and the nodes coordinate to achieve it. It is this unleashing of the power of the network that we want to facilitate. But if you build it, they may not come. Networks take nurturing. Using the gardener or landscaper metaphor, yesterday I said that networks need seeding, feeding, and weeding. "

"Social bookmarking sites like Delicious are useful for collecting bookmarks, but they don't allow users to really draw connections and tell stories. That's where curation-focused services like Pearltrees and Trailmeme come in. Trailmeme, which we first looked at in December, was incubated at Xerox and launches at DEMO this week. It allows users to bookmark sites and then organize them in tidy diagrams, making it easy to highlight the relationship between different items and for readers to browse these links."

"I think of PLEs as Operating Systems just like regular operating systems are for computer users. In fact, I call the PLE a LearnOS. Thinking of a PLE as a LearnOS helps me also get by the initial comprehension of what it can contain, such as tools, resources and connections, as also how it is deployed - PC, mobile and cloud. I can then move on to think about how learning will occur in this LearnOS by asking not only how the LearnOS can be organized to support my learning (feed aggregation, twitter tags and the like) in a given context, or how my LearnOS is connected to other LearnOS-es out there (PLNs), but also to thinking how my LearnOS can adapt to my learning contexts and my learning needs."

Innovation in Online Higher Education Published November 14, 2008 Random... , Thinkses In an article in the Guardian a couple of days ago - UK universities should take online lead, it was reported that "UK universities should push to become world leaders in online higher education", with universities secretary, John Denham, "likely to call" for the development of a "global Open University in the UK". (Can you imagine how well that call went down here?;-) Anyway, the article gave me a heads-up about the imminent publication of a set of reports to feed into a Debate on the Future of Higher Education being run out of the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills.

useful survey and comments on new govnt report on e learing from expert at the OU

BozPages are simple one-off pages of RSS feeds, so you can keep track of a bunch of web pages in one place.

"As I'm getting more and more into using Google Wave, I'm coming to appreciate its collaborative value. The only way that I'm using it right now is as follows: I come up with an idea. I want another opinion about the idea. I write it up in Wave. I share it with others and get them to collaborate with me. "

"Get Started With Google Wave From Wired How-To Wiki Jump to: navigation, search Let's just say this up front: Google Wave doesn't make sense at first glance. It kinda looks like e-mail because you send messages to friends, but it's also like chat because the messages you send to friends can be received and responded to in real time. It's also a little like Google Docs, because the messages you send are rich in display features. However, if you look at Google Wave as a mishmash of Web 2.0 technology, you're missing the point. Google Wave is a communication device all its own. It allows you to communicate online as if you're in the same room, and it makes your communication with large groups of people more powerful and useful. If you really want to conceptualize Google Wave, you're going to have to use it. Here's how. "

"I'm delivering the opening keynote for Edinburgh University's IT Futures Conference today and was asked to deliver an expanded version of the work I've been doing on the physical spaces of learning, and how they transgress virtual learning spaces, too. The theme of the conference is fascinating, and a conversation I'd like to see happening more regularly in more schools: It will look at both the staff and student perspective of what the working space is, and is becoming. Where does technology fit in, and how do we work and study in this increasingly mobile world?"

"As Casey Green said in my recent interview with him, the LMS space is a "market in transition." In 2005, the year that Blackboard acquired WebCT, the two platforms had a combined total of 75.6% U.S. higher education market share, and the next closest competitor had barely cracked 2% market share. Today, the situation is substantially different and changing rapidly. But the narratives around exactly what's happening tend to be off. Typically, I hear the frame as being a contest between Blackboard and "open source." Has "open source" (by which we mean Moodle and Sakai, the two open source LMSs with significant market share in the United States) made inroads into the market? If you read what the majority of sell-side financial analysts1 are writing, you may see the claim that "open source" is not putting a major dent in Blackboard. If you talk to Moodle or Sakai advocates, you might hear that they are crushing the company in sales. Neither account is really capturing what's happening in the market, so I'm going to try to explain what we know about what's really going on in a two-part series. In this post, I'll talk about what the data are telling us so far about the recent shifts in the market, describe how colleges and universities come to decide that they need to go to market for an LMS, and assess the degree to which we may see an uptick in the number of schools that decide to look around and evaluate our options. In the second post, I'll describe how the next four years of market transition may be different than the previous four and what signs we should be watching for to see which way the market is going to break."

'Meta-reading': the generational differences in consuming news May 13th, 2009Posted by Judith Townend in Events, Online Journalism, Social media and blogging Turi Munthe, CEO and founder of the citizen journalism site, Demotix, shared an interesting thought with participants of the Voices Online Blogging Conference on Monday. The young Demotix interns consume news differently from the way he does. He elaborated to Journalism.co.uk after the panel. 'Meta-reading': "There is a generational split, but not in the way everyone imagines. It's much more recent than that," he said. People only ten years younger - he is in his 30s - consume news differently from the way he does, Munthe told Journalism.co.uk. The interns in the office ('who play a hugely important role: they're regional editors and they get properly stuck into what we do') read slightly differently, he said. "They are getting the Twitter feeds, and the blog posts, and the Facebook messaging and the free papers, and everything else, and are very happy with it. Much more happy with it than I am." "Essentially, they process information differently. It's a 'meta-reading'. It's not about individual brands. They are fully aware of all the back-stories of all the stories they're getting," he says. It's a 'degree of sophistication,' he said, 'which reads the interests behind the news as an integral part of the news'.

Mediated Cultures: Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University netvibes site for mike wesch's course using rss feeds etc