Here’s the third in the series of keeping-up-to-date Most news sites now offer desktop news and alerts, often for free. You install a piece of software to have new items produced by these sites delivered to your desktop. An icon will ‘pop up’ when there’s something new to report. These services usually refresh themselves on an hourly basis, although you have to be connected to the internet – as with desktop feedreaders, it’s perhaps best for if you have an internet connection that is always ‘on’, e.g. if you have broadband.
Personalisation
Personalisation is a key factor in getting people to come back to a search engine, by changing the look and feel of the interface beyond the search box. For example, you can customise the interfaces of the major search engines to provide you with additional information, tools and services. If, as I do, you use a search engine often during the day, setting your personalised page to be your home page means that you get the added bonus of snippets of information from other websites.
iGoogle includes things like a wikipedia search box, a to-do list, BBC News (provided via RSS), games and the weather.
The Intute gateway, is a more academic personalisation service. Gateways like Intute index quality control internet resources. By registering you will receive email alerts for new items matching your criteria when they are added to the Intute gateway. This also applies to any searches that you save.
Try this out for yourself:
Go to one of the major search engines (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft), or a tool such as Pageflakes or Netvibes, and customise the opening screen. Experiment to find the modules that will enable you to keep up to date. You will have to register – look for links to MyYahoo, MyMSN, and so on.
Register for MyIntute, and select your areas of interest from ‘Subjects’. Make use of this for your work based learning topics that are of interest to you.
Post a comment and let me know how you got on.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment