Three tremendously useful websites that can save you 500 hours this year.
I have seen many people commenting that they waste lots of time surfing the net for news and other websites. Most of the people have a surfing pattern which means there are a set of websites which they usually browse every time they browse the net.It might be social networking sites or email accounts or news web sites or you tube etc.
A surfer usually logs on to these sites one by one and checks out their content till they finish all of them. Some surfers might also miss out browsing many of their favorite sites either because of lack of time or may be they totally forget it. So, what is the way around?
The Internet is a huge repository of data. If that data has to make sense, it should be in some organized format. The organized form of data is called information and information is power in today's age. The person who is having the right information at the right time will have an edge without any doubt. So, how will we churn this data and convert it into information so that we can make the most of it?
Technology has come up with the right answer at the right time. I will introduce you to three websites which I found tremendously useful in 2007. It has saved me almost 600 hrs in 2007 (which means about 1.5 hours per day. (I know it sounds like a marketing campaign but all I want you to understand is the immense potential of this trio when combined together). This by no means is a full tutorial to these useful web tools. This is just an intro. If you really get interested after visiting these sites, you can check them out.
Bloglines is a content aggregator. In simple terms, it just collates all the content you usually browse from various websites and put them in one single place so that you can read all of them in one shot. For example, if you are a person who visits various news web sites and go through all the head lines, then simply link your Bloglines account to that news site and bingo, you will get all the information you need in Bloglines front page. Like that you can insert multiple links to different news websites (local or international) and have all those in one place. Suppose you missed today's news, don't worry and search the entire site for yesterday's edition.
Bloglines will simply keep the content till you read them. If you have read it, Bloglines will automatically remove it from the list of the news headlines from your account. Alternatively you can opt to keep the content for later reference. The best way to know more is to try it out. It is very simple. But there is a small catch here. If the site supports RSS feed (The web pages with an orange button with RSS written on the top of it supports RSS) then only we can subscribe that page to Bloglines. So, what if your favorite site does not support RSS? That is where Feedity and Dapper comes into picture.
Ok, now that we know how to collect information from different pages on the internet and put it at one single location (your Bloglines home page). But most of the pages does not support RSS. So, if a site does not support RSS, the easiest way to make it available to Bloglines is to use the site called Feedity. There are lots of sites around which offers similar kind of functions but I like Feedity.com because of the ease of use. Go to Feedity and simply type the address of the web site that you want to subscribe and Feedity will automatically create a feed for you in the form of a link. You just need to copy that link and paste it in your Bloglines page through the ADD tab.
What if you want a more customized representation of data? Or say, you want to combine data from different pages and make it available in your Bloglines home page in a tailored format. That is where Dapper comes into picture. Dapper allows you to reformat the data presented in a website and make that feed available for your news aggregators like Bloglines. For example I visit youtube.com frequently for new local language music videos. So, I go to youtube.com and give my search conditions every time and you tube present me with the new videos. But these days I use a dapper feed to filter only the videos which I want. I have subscribed to that feed which was created by Dapper through Bloglines.
Great article! Another one to add to the list is OVGuide.com! It will eliminate the need to go through layers of search links to find great online videos and movies! Check it out!
