Thing #14: Explore Technorati

So now that you’ve been blogging for a while, you might be wondering just how big the blogosphere is? Well according to Technorati, the leading search tool and authority for blogs, there are “over 175,000 new blogs (that’s just blogs) every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second.”

Yes, these numbers are astounding, but as you’ve already seen for yourselves, blogging is so easy that these publishing tools are being taken advantage of by almost every industry.

There are a lot of features in Technorati including the capability to search for keywords in blog posts, search for entire blog posts that have been tagged with a certain keyword, limit a search by language, or search for blogs that have been registered and tagged as whole blogs about a certain subject (like marketing or advertising).

Discovery Exercise:

1. Take a look at Technorati and try doing a keyword search for “Learning 2.0” in Blog posts, in tags and in the Blog Directory. Are the results different?

2. Explore the Technorati Top 100 Blogs. Is there anything of interest in there for you?

3. Create a blog post about your discoveries on the site.

Thing #13: Discover Del.icio.us

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking manager, which allows you to categorise and share your bookmarks online, so that you can access them from any computer connected to the internet - great if you need to access your bookmarks from multiple locations.

Just like Flickr where you can organise your photos using tags, using del.icio.us you can also organise your bookmarks with tags any way you want to.

What makes del.icio.us attractive to its users is the social aspect. You may think you have found some great web sites and then you tag them, but you are also able to see what other people have bookmarked and see what else they have tagged that may be of interest to you. It's a great way of sharing interesting links with colleagues or friends.

For this exercise, you need to visit del.icio.us and type something of interest to yourself into the search bar. Find another user's trail and you may just discover a new wealth of information. Let us know what you find and what you think of social bookmarking on your blog.

If you are really keen sign up and become a del.icio.us user it's a great way of keeping track of interesting websites, especially if you are someone that works from a few different locations or you want to share links with others.

Thing #12: Catch up and Comment!

Watch this little video...

... and then go and comment on two other participants' blogs. Easy!

Thing #11: Explore Twitter

Have you experienced Twitter yet? It's a free social networking and micro-blogging service that connects its users through short messages called "tweets". It's really just like a blog, only each post can contain a maximum of 140 characters.

Watch this video:



Even if you don't join or contribute to Twitter, you can still use its powerful search function. Now watch this video:



So, for this "thing", you are required to search on Twitter for tweets on a topic that interests you. If you wish, you are also encouraged to sign up to Twitter and tweet about the 23 Things program!

Discovery Exercise:

1. Go to Twitter and search for a term that interests you. For example, try "Monash" and see what people are saying!

2. Sign up for a Twitter account. You can use a pseudonym if you are concerned about privacy, and you are welcome to delete your Twitter account later if you decide not to continue using it.

3. Tweet! If you include the hashtag "#monash23" in your tweet, then other participants in this program will be able to find it by simply searching for it. It will also appear in the new widget that's been added on the left of this main page!

4. Write a blog post to describe your experiences on Twitter.

Thing #10: Play with an Online Image Generator

Online image generators allow you to easily manipulate text, image and graphics to create fun images like the one above, or like these:

For this discovery exercise, you can have some fun. Find a few fun image or text generators to play around with and write a post in your blog about one of your favourites. Make sure that you display your newly generated image in your blog posting. Often it will be a matter of copying and pasting some code. If not, you might just need to right-click on the image and then save it to your hard drive before using Blogger's image button to add it to your post.

If you're having difficulty getting your image added to a post in your blog, then check other participant's blogs and ask someone who has succeeded for some help.


Discovery Resources:
The Generator Blog
Big Huge Labs
Copyright Friendly Image Generators Wiki
... or search on Google for others!


Discovery Exercise:
1. Play around with some image generators and find one that you like.
2. Post the result of your discovery in your blog. Please be sure to include a link to the image generator itself, so other participants can discover it, too!

So, take some time, and have some fun!

Thing #9: Locate some Marketing blogs

Now that you have your newsreader setup, you can begin adding other newsfeeds that interest you. There are several ways that you can locate newsfeeds:

• When visiting your favourite websites, look for news feed icons that indicate the website provides it. Often a feed icon will be displayed somewhere in the navigation bar of the site.
  
  
• Use Google Reader's search tool - just click on the "Add a subscription" button in Google Reader, then get searching!
  


• Find a reliable list of useful blogs. You might want to take a look at Julian Cole's Top 50 Australian Marketing Blogs - Julian completed his honours at Monash a couple of years ago, and is now working in a digital agency in Sydney.
  


• Use other search tools to find feeds, such as Technorati or Syndic8.
  

Discovery Exercise:

Explore some of the search tools above, find some relevant news feeds, and add them to your reader. Then, create a blog post about your experience. Which method was easiest to find relevant feeds? Did you find other search tools that were useful? Which feeds appear to be of interest, that you can recommend for others?

Thing #8: Learn about RSS feeds

information hydrant
Originally uploaded by Will Lion

You've heard of RSS? You've probably seen those little orange icons on websites, but maybe you still don't know what RSS is all about. Well, don't worry, many people are confused by RSS, but this is changing rapidly. In the information world, RSS is not only revolutionising the way news, media and content creators share information, but it is also changing the way everyday users are consuming information.
RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication", and is a file format for delivering regularly updated information over the web.

Just think about the websites and news information sources you visit every day. It takes time to visit those sites and scour the ad-filled and image-heavy pages for just the text you want to read, doesn’t it? Now imagine if you could visit all those information sources and web pages in just one place and all at the same time … without being bombarded with advertising… without having to search for new information on the page you’d already seen or read before… and without having to consume a lot of time visiting each site individually. Would that be valuable to you? Well, it’s available now through a newsreader and RSS.

To learn more about RSS, start by watching this short video from Commoncraft, RSS in Plain English:

Discovery Exercise:

Your discovery exercise for this "thing" is to set up your very own RSS reader. Seeing that you now have an active Google account (the one you used to set up your own blog in Blogger), it may be easiest to use Google Reader. Here's another video from Commoncraft, explaining how Google Reader works. Alternatively, there are many other RSS readers available that you can use - there's even one in Lotus Notes (but you're on your own if you choose to use that one!).

Once you've got your RSS reader setup, see if you can add this blog to your feeds, and some of your colleagues' blogs too!

Finally, create a post in your blog about this exercise. Many earlier postings have noted that it's becoming challenging to filter the huge volume of information available online these days - do you think an RSS reader will help?