RSS FEEDS

Today, in digital journalism, we looked at how to use our Google accounts and RSS feeds. This involved looking at google reader (http://www.google.co.uk/reader) and how to access the information from our favourite websites without wasting time trawling the web to find them.

Most major news sites offer free RSS feeds which gives you the information you want, fast. For example, the BBC offers a free feed via its news page. By copying and pasting the url link from that page, you can add it to your subscriptions on Google Reader by simply clicking on the add subscription box.

We also learnt about websites such as http://www.delicious.com/ and http://trunk.ly/ These websites are a viable alternative to simple bookmarks and favourites when you are using the web.

By tagging, and using tags that other users have used, you can find the information you want, again, quickly. If you wish to find stories on Carlos Tevez, you merely type his name into the search box and all the stories he has been tagged in by other Delicious users will appear.

Then we went on to social networking sites and how to make news from your RSS feeds appear on your twitter account or facebook account. This was done with the help of websites such as: http://twitterfeed.com and http://ifttt.com.

These are websites that allow the fast transfer of information from your RSS feeds direct to other users on your Twitter and Facebook accounts. This is especially useful with Twitter because of the quick and easy ways you can find people with similar interests to your own on the site.

ifttt.com in particular caused a stir, because of the way you can time when stuff from your RSS feed can appear on websites. For example, you can make a post from your RSS feed appear every day at 2pm should you wish.

The session was very useful as it taught me how to use programmes I'd previously never used before. In particular google reader. It is a far simpler and quicker way to get the information you need rather than just trawling through the internet.