Consuming Information

We're all learning how to create new web content, but what are the best and fastest ways to process it?

By Brett Bonfield -- Library Journal, 10/15/2007

While librarians and users have been inundated with advice on how to produce content for MySpace, blogs, and other Web 2.0 services, there's been much less discussion about using newer technologies to consume all this new content efficiently.

[Web-exclusive sidebar, Assessing Information, below.]

These technologies are new to everyone, and the flood is hitting us all at the same time. If you're drowning, imagine how your users feel. We must learn how to use information better and to share that understanding. By removing software as a barrier, we can focus on data. Too often we conflate data and interface, talking about blogs, podcasts, or Second Life as if we must make drastic adjustments to process the data. But it's generally just text, supplemented with photos, audio, or video.

Like the telephone before it, email has become so prevalent that we may be accused of inconveniencing others if we do not regularly check it. Register your own domain; for less than $10 a year, you can forever keep the same email address, which can also be used for your web site.

Domains, like telephone numbers, are fully portable and remain email account and email reader agnostic. You can forward you@yourdomain.com to any account you like and check your email with either a web-based interface, a desktop client, such as Thunderbird or Outlook, or use Thunderbird at home and Gmail at work.

You only have to register once for mailing lists and web-based services like LinkedIn or Facebook, and you aren't locked into a work or vendor email address. Not only is your email address portable, but the settings on your account and mail reader are yours—so you own the messages, not your employer. If you correspond with friends from your own domain's email address, you get out of the habit of using your work email for personal messages.

Look for a low-cost ICANN-accredited registrar—Superbowl advertiser GoDaddy may be the best known—or a reseller that works with an ICANN-accredited registrar, such as NameCheap, which is a discount reseller for eNom, the second largest domain registrar after GoDaddy.

Make sure your domain registration includes free email forwarding so that you can read and respond to a message sent to you@yourdomain.com from free (Gmail, etc.) accounts and free transfers so you can move to another registrar. Also make sure it includes as many email addresses as possible, so you can use different addresses when shopping online or subscribing to mailing lists.

It would be nice to say that open source and other competitors might catch up, but Gmail remains dominant. It offers superb spam filtering and threaded conversation, which helps organize your important messages. Given its free support for POP3 (which allows you to export all your messages whenever you want) and for sending messages from any domain, you need not worry about vendor lock-in: no one needs to know you're using Gmail or ever see your Gmail address (though you can show it).

Its filters and labels make it simple to sort messages as they arrive. You can set up Gmail to label your mailing list subscriptions as “mailing lists,” or you can configure it to differentiate the “cataloging” messages from the “collection development” messages.

Given the reliance on advertising based on email text, Gmail raises potential privacy issues, but we live in a world in which any Internet service provider or host could potentially violate your privacy, and Google seems as trustworthy as the competition.

For web sites that don't offer mailing lists, RSS or Atom feeds can save you much time by delivering information you value within hours after it's published. I prefer to receive feeds via email to minimize the number of programs I have running and the number of interfaces in use.

To turn a feed into an email message, you must run it through conversion software. An easy one for nontechies is RSSFwd. Simply paste in the feed URL and give RSSFwd your email address (which you have to confirm the first time you subscribe to a feed). After that, you'll start getting “email messages” from your favorite web sites.

RSSFwd is free, and the software that runs it is open source. Techies might also want to consider rss2email, an open source application first developed by Open Library technical leader Aaron Swartz.

An increasingly popular option is to use a web-based reader, like Bloglines or Google Reader, to organize incoming feeds and check them from anywhere. For people who like to have separate checking accounts for holidays or vacations, these services can be incredibly useful.

You also can use standalone software packages, such as the open source RSSOwl or Thunderbird, the mail client companion program to Mozilla's Firefox web browser, or shareware programs such as FeedDemon for Windows or Newsgator for Mac. Software you run locally is still generally quicker and more powerful than web-based applications.

Experiment with different options until you find the way that feed-reading works best for you. All these feed readers except rss2email support OPML importing and exporting, which allows you to transfer your list of feed subscriptions from one application to another.

Many sites still don't push their content to the users who want to receive it. If a site you like lacks its own feed or email list, try using Dapper or Page2RSS or a similar service.

These services are imperfect—sometimes they miss a change, so return to the web site you're following a few times after you create a feed to make sure you're not missing something important.

With the rise of web-based applications like Google Docs and Meebo, we likely will spend even more time using browsers. While your library may use Internet Explorer in its public machines, there's no reason not to install open source Firefox on your desktop or to recommend it to patrons. Invest a few minutes here and there into saving hours year after year.

How much time could you save if you didn't need to click on that tiny little scrollbar button to move quickly up and down your screen? With the Firefox extension Scrollbar Anywhere, just right-click anywhere within the browser and hold down the button to scroll.

The Firefox extension NoSquint remembers which web sites should have larger text and which should have smaller text. Extension AdBlock Plus gets rid of advertisements. Other essential Firefox extensions include Resizeable TextArea, Linkification, and Uppity (see “Firefox at the Reference Desk,” LJ 12/06, p. 166).

Once you install these small programs, you might forget them, at least until you have to use a friend's machine—and then you'll really miss them.

Consider bookmarklets as well, such as OCLC's amazing xISBN bookmarklet. Read up on Firefox's about:config (one easy change lets pop-ups open in a new tab). Make your buttons smaller and move them around so they take up less room and are easier to press. Make use of Smart Keywords.

Mailing lists and blogs can be useful, but they are often hard to prioritize. When I meet librarians who really impress me, I don't ask which mailing lists and blogs they follow, I ask which one they have the hardest time giving up or which one they read first.

Use the blogrolls that many bloggers or web sites post. If several of your favorite bloggers have a feed included in their blogrolls, you'll likely get something useful from that feed as well.

Are search engine relevancy algorithms really so distinct? Yes. A good way to avoid the sensation of redundancy is to remember that different search engines can be useful for different aspects of your search. For instance, Google does synonyms wonderfully.

Exalead lets you use regular expressions (a pattern matching syntax that is to boolean searching as boolean searching is to keyword searching). Live Search gives you tremendous control over your searches by letting you specify keywords—e.g., inanchor, inbody, intitle, inurl, link, linkdomain, linkfromdomain—to provide granular control over your searches.

While email was once informal compared to print, now email is established, and IM (and texting) are less formal. If people want to save you time by sending you short messages, and they're implying that they only expect a short response, isn't that a gift?

Be prepared for that gift by installing and understanding the open source Pidgin (formerly GAIM) or the free (but upgradable for a fee) Trillian, or by signing up for the free, web-based Meebo.

Pidgin works for every IM protocol in popular use, including IRC (home of code4lib), though some prefer Trillian's interface. Meebo has fewer features—like Trillian, it does not yet support IRC—but for many, simplicity helps. Just remember to get a free account/identity and become familiar with each of the major protocols: AIM, ICQ, IRC (more for group chat than one-to-one instant messaging), Jabber, MSN, and Yahoo!

For $20 or so, you can buy a 1GB flash drive that you can use to carry around not just the files you need to get your work done but also the software you need to be productive on just about any machine you use.

Like how you have Firefox set up? Carry it with you, along with the dozen or two other programs you use in order to consume and manipulate information. Start with John Haller's open source PortableApps Suite, which includes useful applications like Firefox, Pidgin, and OpenOffice.org. Learn a program once, configure how you want it, and have it accessible when you need it.

For me, the only sites worth visiting daily are social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us's “popular” page and programming.reddit.com, a great source for learning about the latest technology trends. Both offer feeds, but the information on these sites changes so rapidly and their layouts are so clean, that I prefer to scan them via the browser.

Del.icio.us, which was acquired by Yahoo!, makes it easy to share your bookmarks with the world or with specific people and also to see who else has bookmarked sites you find interesting (see “Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us,” LJ 9/15/07, p. 26–28).

Reddit, a Condé Nast acquisition, allows users to vote (thumbs up or down) on others' bookmarks and comment on them. It has attracted a techie group, especially on its programming subpage. Using these sites' simple bookmarking features helps you keep a diary of what you were reading or exploring at a given point in time.

Few occurrences are more frustrating than losing work. Besides backing up your work regularly, make sure you're using the right program for the job; if not, each time you open a file, or transfer it to another format or machine, something could go wrong.

Applications that enable online collaboration help prevent such mishaps, because as long as you have your password, you have access to your information—and others whom you invite do as well.

For our purposes, it's not so much whom you invite but who invites you. If anyone wants you to read their manuscript, why not have them post it online to Google Docs or Zoho or Writewith? You don't have to go through multiple steps, you just have to open the document, read it, and respond.

Other services that make sharing easier are EditGrid (a more Excel-like spreadsheet application than Google Spreadsheets), LazyBase (great for simple database functionality or maintaining lists), CiteBite (which bookmarks specific sections of a page), and NotLong (like TinyURL but with URLs that you create yourself).

Often it's faster to read, but sometimes audio or video is preferable. So it's important to be ready to listen to the sound or video files people have sent you, or the podcasts or vlogs (audio and video web logs) you've found yourself.

Open source applications VLC and MPlayer are available for most platforms, including your flash drive, through PortableApps. Most people already know about iTunes. If you find yourself listening to podcasts or watching vlogs frequently enough to subscribe to them, consider a podcatcher (the AV equivalent of a feed reader), such as the open source Juice. Other options are aggregated nicely at PodcatcherMatrix.

If you're just going to take one step, I recommend getting to know Firefox. Your browser should be your most used application. Still, the tools and techniques I cite might not be right for everyone. They're intended mostly to illustrate ways we can save time without sacrificing our security, privacy, or the option to change our minds. They also follow our core principles, are complementary rather than interdependent, and are simple, familiar, and comfortably within our budget.