Blog 5 (Week 6)

I’ve seen the universal RSS feed symbol on many website pages, but never really understood what it was about.

So, after reading helpful tips from CyberJournalist.net, I thought I better hop to it and download an RSS reader.   I chose FeedDemon.

A quick tutorial lesson brought me up to speed with how to operate the program and explained what RSS feeds were.

What I’ve come to realise is that the endless hours spent searching regular topics I’m interested in, could have been made a whole lot easier with the use of RSS feeds!

I’ve also realised, that as a print journalist, this could be one of the most important tools in my trade.

After successfully adding my first RSS feed to my reader, Yahoo7 National News,  I see that google just got a whole lot less important for me.

 Other useful tools I’ve learnt from the readings this week include:-

Technorati –  I found this quite easy to navigate around.

Moblogs – This will need to be tested in a later blog post.

Podcasts –  Here is an example of a podcast I created a moment ago using Audacity software.

Multi-media tools podcast

 Vlogs – I will post a vlog in a later post.

 del.icio.us – Another new tool for me and I’m not sure how to use the bookmarks, something I’ll investigate when I have more time.

- Out of curiosity, I re-visited my newly established RSS reader a day after setting it up.  One click of a ‘update feeds button’ and I had pages of new headlines from my Yahoo news website – that simple!