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Tuesday Tech Tips

by Michael Krupa on September 13, 2010

Step right up for this week’s Tuesday Tech Tips.  I did a random grab of tech news from my Instapaper archive so I’m guessing I will please no one with these tips.  I joke, I joke.  Anyhoo, on with the tips.

Do you have an iPad and an iPhone or maybe 2 iPads or perhaps 4 iPhones?  If yes, then Engadget has a review of the overachieving iPADock.

I know a bunch of you tried out the new Google Voice integration in Gmail. Now the good folks over at Google have written up some handy features of Google Voice in Gmail.

Calling all iPhone or iPod Touch runners!!  There is a new Nike+ App that throws away the little Nike+ sensor and instead uses the accelerometer of your iOS device.  Whats not to like about that?

With all the Tweetups going on all over the world, you are going to need a way to keep in video touch with all your new tweeps.  Skype 5.0 Beta to the rescue with 10 way video calling.

I love me some full screen browser windows all the time.  Google took that one step further and created Fullscreen mode in Google Reader.  Life is pretty good now.

I know all you iPhone owners out there have been waiting for iOS 4.1 (especially iPhone 3G users waiting for the performance tweaks in iOS4 to make their iPhones usable again). Head on over to the TiPb blog for an iOS4 walkthrough.

I’m not sure what took so long but TiVo finally produced a remote with a built-in keyboard.  Good grief TiVo, your product lifecycles are longer than even Microsoft’s.  If you are not sure the new TiVo Slide Remote is for you, read the Engadget review here and the Zatz Not Funny review here.

The controversial new Twitter app for iPad built by Loren Brichter and his team (who developed the Tweetie app) is out.  If you have an iPad you probably already have the new Twitter app but you might want to take a peek at the TUAW Blog review anyway.

And finally (he says while trying to keep from giggling in that nerdy sort of way)…who wouldn’t want an Atom-powered PC in “an exact replica” of the original beige Commodore C64 chassis.  Christmas is just around the corner.

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A Fairly Simple Explanation of RSS

by Michael Krupa on March 8, 2010

This guest post is authored by Ben Eubanks. Ben is an HR professional from Huntsville, AL. He lives much of his life online. Don’t believe it? Catch him on LinkedIn, Twitter, or via email. His blog, UpstartHR, is about many things, including human resources, leadership, and ninjas.

If you’re not familiar with RSS, I have a fairly simple explanation for you.

RSS is a simply an Internet technology standard that allows busy people to receive updates to web-based content of interest. You might have figured that much out by now. But basically, that’s the essence of an RSS feed – you subscribe and then receive new content automatically in your feed reader.

People use RSS every day to help them read the news and stay on top of new topics. I think RSS has some benefits for the workplace, too, but this quote from Oscar Berg tells us why RSS is not being adopted in the workplace (yet):

The same reasoning applies to RSS – there is no other way to fully understand the benefits of RSS. Although it is quite easy to explain the benefits of RSS when compared to traditonal information seeking, you will not truly understand these benefits until you let RSS change your own consumption patterns. When you have done this, it is fairly easy to translate these benefits to a business context and to envision how RSS could be used within an enterprise context.

My RSS success story

I can still remember the first time I used RSS. It was amazing. It was soon after I really started getting into reading and following blogs online. Every morning I opened up 10 tabs in Firefox and checked my favorite sites one by one to see if there were any updates. After a week or two of doing that, I realized I could sign up for email updates. That cut down on my visits to the sites, but then it cluttered up my inbox, taking time from things that needed to be replied to.

Then I discovered RSS. I had been using Gmail for a few months and clicked over to my Google Reader for the first time to see what it was. I realized that I could add the feeds for each of the sites I followed and it would collect them to view in one place. I was blown away. Where I had been spending maybe 30 minutes a day typing URLs and looking to see if any of the sites had any new content I was now able to just open my RSS reader and start browsing. I cut my time down to 10 minutes a day with that simple step. From then on I was hooked!

Taking RSS to work

Now for the hard part. How can I use RSS feeds at work to save me time and effort? To be honest, I’m still trying to figure this one out. I have some ideas, though…

  • News (professional development, baby!)
  • Team updates (what’s everyone working on?)
  • Project updates (great way to document a project timeline)
  • Set up a special shared tag in Google Reader and share all items in that with your team
  • Open job updates (recruiters?)
  • New employee feed (orientation?)

I just scraped these from my cranium with a little effort. There are so many great tools for using RSS feeds. Do you know of more? How could you use RSS at work?

Image by Paul Watson.

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