What are these?
News feed and social bookmarking tools
RSS Feeds
What are news feeds?
The news and event feeds on this site allow you to see when we’ve added new content. Feeds from this site (and any other you choose to use) make all of this information available in one place as soon as it is updated, without having to spend time visiting each site directly.
How do you use the feeds on this site?
There are several ways to use feeds - to get started however you will need some sort of feed reader. A reader will automatically check your feeds allowing you to quickly view anything that has been added. Several browsers such as Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer 7 have built in feed display capabilities that allow users to view feeds simply by clicking on the orange feed icon. Click the links to see how each browser manages feeds.
The real power of web syndication is the ability to bring content from all over the web directly to you, without having to go search for it. To take full advantage of multiple feeds it can be very helpful to use a dedicated reader. These downloadable programs generally run directly on your machine. Another type of dedicated reader is web-based - one of our favorites it the free Google Reader This tool also uses Google’s search engine technology to facilitate feed-discovery - allowing you to quickly search the web and add the feeds you want.
To view a list (and links to) various feed readers click here.
For a more in depth discussion of feeds click here.
Social Bookmarking
Digg
“Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. You won’t find editors at Digg — we’re here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content and we’re changing the way people consume information online…” more
Del.icio.us
“del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website — the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too. On del.icio.us, you can use tags to organize and remember your bookmarks, which is a much more flexible system than folders.
You can also use del.icio.us to see the interesting links that your friends and other people bookmark, and share links with them in return. You can even browse and search del.icio.us to discover the cool and useful bookmarks that everyone else has saved — which is made easy with tags….” more
StumbleUpon
“StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of 4,199,881 other websurfers with interests similar to you. Rating these sites you like automatically shares them with like-minded people – and helps you discover great sites your friends recommend.
StumbleUpon uses ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages which friends and like-minded stumblers have recommended. This helps you discover great content you probably wouldn’t find using a search engine…” more
