Toluu & Social Median

Here are two more RSS’esque readers for you to ponder both of which are truly web 2.0 power tools because they harness the power of the crowd. Toluu likes to learn from you while Social Median has a fresh take on how you select articles.

Toluu

Toluu via kwout

Ok so I cheated a little bit, Toluu isn’t a stand alone RSS feed reader, it actually plugs into your existing feed reader and opens a host of social aspects to your reader. You essentially are sharing what you read with others and they share with you what they are reading. It is a great way to discover new articles that are filtered to be something that you are interested in and approved by people who have similar interests as you.

Toluu does require that you be able to download your OPML file (a file that has all your existing feeds in a list) from your existing feed reader and upload it to Toluu. This is not difficult and there is plenty of documentation on how to do this for almost every feed reader.  A good feature if you are just starting or have already imported your feed list and just need to add another feed to both is a bookmarklet (a bookmark button that you easily drag into you easily drag onto the bookmark bar of your browser) that lets you add feeds easily to both your existing RSS reader and Toluu simultaneously.

All of this is great if you have contacts but how do you get contacts? Toluu has a great feature called “matches” that

In short Toluu’s strength lies in it’s ability to harness the power of your contacts to help you filter what you read as well as help you discover important information that you may not have found otherwise.

+ Very social, allowing filtering and discovery from your circle of contacts
+ Not really all that much to do just upload your OPML file and your already going
+ It learns as you and your contacts filter, the more activity you have the more it learns what you like and dislike
+ Doesn’t try to replace your current RSS reader, just enhance it

- You already need an RSS feed for it to work
- Not a traditional layout for RSS feeds so it takes time to get used to

For more information on Toluu check out this article.

Social Median

socialmedian via kwout

Unlike many RSS feeds Social Median only gives you articles from your areas of interest that other people have recommend and not from a specific website, its all filtered and voted on so you get only the best articles. Instead of having an application or a website that you go to to get your articles they are sent via email at specified times of your choosing.  This makes reading articles less linear and more explorative and social. Is one better than the other? Really its apples and oranges and dependent on your preferences and if you are me you will use both styles.

Social Median really focuses on the social aspect of RSS feed reading and that is a tricky endeavor because when it is socially based it relies on the crowd to help the cream of articles rise to the top. If the crowd doesn’t exist the tool is essentially useless and fortunately there is a real good growth trend for social median.

+ Great way to discover articles outside of your regular RSS jaunts
+ RSS coming to you via your email
+ Great filtering based on what others are reading and enjoying
+ Easy way to discover new social connections based on similarities with what you look for in articles

= You will most definitely miss some good articles but also gain ones that you may never have discovered

+ Strength of filtering is based on the crowd

- Not as thorough as a regular RSS feed

Stay tuned for my finally of RSS readers where I show you how to set one up.

There are many RSS readers out there and although I gave a few options in a previous tutorial I didn’t delve very deeply into those options. So in this three part series I will delve a bit deeper into the options and how exactly to set up an RSS feed.

Sage for Firefox: Sage is an extension for the Firefox browser that aims to make RSS feeds easy to integrate into your daily regiment at any time.

+Integrates directly into Firefox
+Integrates into Firefox’s bookmarking system
+Visually customizable through Cascading Style Sheets
+Feed Discovery
+clean and uncluttered

= bare bones

-You need access to your browser to read your RSS feeds
-You need to use Firefox to access your RSS feeds
-Not as many social networking features

Google Reader: As mentioned in a previous article Google reader comes with a Gmail account and all the other great Google products. It may not be the best RSS reader but it fits seamlessly into the Google suite, improves all the time and is the reader that I use the most.

+Automatically created with your free Google account
+Integrated into the Google suite
+A good selection of social features
+User interface has a great cognitive structure that “chunks” the information well
+Always getting better
+Drag and drop functionality and collapsable folders for a tree menu

= All online and accessible from anywhere but must use a browser

-Looks bland
-Not many extra features
-Not intuitive to set up the folders (need to click on a feed and then select feed settings)

In the next article I will go over some very social options in RSS called Toluu and Hordit. Check for it later this week.

I know that most everyone that is reading this has heard of RSS feeds. What I also know is that so many people either under use an RSS reader or don’t use it at all.

There are a ton of RSS tools out there, some are extensions of like Sage for Firefox, Google Reader, and there are stand alone readers like Toluu, Hordit, Social Median, and Mac mail even has an integrated RSS feed reader. Many of these tools are also integrated into a much larger social community to help filter out the noise and make your experience even more rich. So why is RSS such an underused tool?

First off we need to address who would benefit from using an RSS tool and to do this I am going to steal a schtick from Jeff Foxworthy:

• If you spend any more than 30 min a day on the internet, ya might need RSS.
• If you look at the same website more than 4 times a month, ya might need RSS.
• If you feel like you miss world news, ya might need RSS
• If you like to maintain currency with anything, ya might need RSS
• If you ever feel bogged down going on the internet, ya might need RSS.

In my opinion the reason RSS feeds are so underused is a lack of understanding and technical jargon. That coupled with the thought that they can be hard to setup and difficult to use. In 2 minutes you can have an RSS reader setup and be using it, when youfind a website you want to add you only have to click one or 2 buttons to have it added. It’s that easy.

So what is RSS?

Essentially RSS brings the web to your door and allows you to quickly scan the articles that you already find interesting and either fully read them or determine if you would rather not.

I personally use Google Reader and I subscribe to 59 websites and get on average 200-250 new articles everyday, Now if I were to go to every website and look through those articles I would easily take up my entire workday but because of RSS I am able to scan all those articles, read the ones that I find most interesting and bookmark them if need be all in 45 min spread out the day. Essentially this increases my productivity by over 800 percent.

Not only is my productivity up but I pair this up with other social networking tools such as twitter and even the built in sharing tools that most RSS feeds have now and I am able to share articles that my co-workers and colleagues find useful which keeps them current and up to date.

If you are like me though there are tools that you can use to further filter a website that you have subscribed to. Pipes by Yahoo! will filter based on nearly whatever criteria you wish. I use it primarily for a website called Gizmodo which has nearly a hundred posts a day but I have it filtered to give me only 20-30 articles per day of things that I know I am going to be interested in instead of all the other articles that I know I won’t read.

How can I use this for education?

• Increase productivity
• Stay up to date with current trends in education, technology or whatever
• You won’t miss important articles
• Waste less time on the internet
• archive articles you like
• develop relationships with colleagues and share important articles

As usual I am open to know how you think it can be used in education and look forward to my RSS setup article coming soon. Also I will be posting my thoughts on the different RSS tools that I listed above.