Jan
31
2009
It’s so easy to wander around the web scoring sometimes but mainly wasting time. Chris Brogan provides some great suggestions on how to maintain focus, broaden horizons and make productive use of some of the key tools and services on the internet. Here’s ten of them in my favourite personal knowledge management theme:
Streams of Information
- Think about FriendFeed as your own personal newsroom or communications center.
- Revisit Reddit as a news source, and also as a roll-your-own tool for information clustering.
- Use Alltop as an idea-starter, or as competitive analysis of content spaces.
- Cook up six powerful searches on Twitter Search and add those RSS outputs to your feed reader.
- Visit Slideshare weekly and search for new presentations to learn from.
- Use YouTube as a source for lectures and learning. Use Magnify as a curation tool.
- Rediscover what’s interesting in Delicious/Popular. Go back and find tags that matter more to you.
- Reconsider your current blog reading list. Do some quick math. If it is more than 60% related to your industry, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Find the outliers.
- Pick at least one news source from outside your country to monitor information from a different perspective. One of my sources is The Guardian.
- Subscribe to at least one blog with a strong opposing view. Learn from it. Learn where your position is different. Learn how they say what they say successfully. Discover what has impact and what doesn’t.
Read the full post at chrisbrogan.com
Jan
28
2009
Ravit Lichtenberg at Read Write Web has a go at the coming evolution of social media.
Excerpt: Social media is morphing into a holistic experience that speaks to people’s social needs in new ways. If you are a CEO of a startup who is focusing on the next generation of social media, here are 10 areas you’ll need to take into consideration in the coming year:
1. It’s About People
2. Creating Meaning and Value
3. Enabling Convergence
4. Building a Truly Cross-Platform Experience
5. Creating Relevant Social Networks
6. Innovating in the Advertising Space
7. Helping People Organize Their “Old” Social Media Ecosystem
8. Connecting with the Rest of the US and the World
9. Preparing for New Social Media Jobs
10. Making Money
Read Ravit’s full post here
As someone always trying out these things with diminishing expectations, my take on this is that Friendfeed is very close to getting it as right as possible and some sort of cloud based integration with storage, reference, lifestreaming (such as Evernote) wouild cap the whole thing off. My big problem is the disappearance of community and personal knowledge in social media due to age rather than relevance.
Jan
14
2009
This is a comprehensive look at trends, challenges and considerations for mobile web design from Smashing Magazine.
Excerpt: Web designers know that the industry involves plenty of change, and continuous adaption and development of skills is required in order to stay up to date. In the past few years, one of the biggest areas of change has been the amount of Internet users who are accessing websites via phones and mobile devices. As a result, Web designers have a growing need to be educated in this area and ready to design websites that accommodate this audience.
Read this excellent post in full here with useful examples and links to other mobile web design standards and issues.
