Links for March 2, 2006 – Podcasts & Book Publishing

  • – Podcast transcription search engine.
  • – Blog-to-book publishing software. Extracts your blog posts and formats them in a book format that you can then sell.
  • – These are the podcasts of science fiction writer James Patrick Kelly. two-time winner of the Hugo award

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Links for March 1, 2006 – RSS Service

  • – edgeio dynamically organizes listings published from RSS enabled websites making them discoverable via the edgeio website and through an open set of web services. Our goal is to give publishers of all sizes the means to control how their content is published.

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Links for February 28, 2006 – Blogs, Podcasting, Online Presentations, Car Community, Personalized Search Engines, The Long Tail

  • – An online PowerPoint-style presentation application.
  • – Free, ad-supported podcast service. You don’t need hardware, hosting, or even expertise.
  • – Edmunds.com’s social networking site for auto enthusiasts
  • – A swicki is new kind of search engine that allows anyone to create deep, focused searches on topics you care about. Unlike other search engines, you and your community have total control over the results and it uses the wisdom of crowds to improve search
  • – Essential article on the economics of digital distribution.

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Links for February 24, 2006 – Podcasts, Online Video, Social Web, Blogging, Mobile, Online Calendar, Personalized Search Engine

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Links for February 23, 2006 – Vikings Stadium, Craigslist, Online Graffiti, Sharing Web, Animation

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Links for February 20, 2006 – Online Applications & Tools, RSS, Package Tracking, Photo Seach, Real Estate, TV, Wifi, Minnesota Movies

  • – Simple software to help you get organized.
  • – Everyday products that are cool.
  • – Webmaster Tools and SEO Software Resources.
  • – nativetext is a free web service that translates RSS feeds from blogs and podcasts into foreign languages.
  • – trakpak is the easy way to track multiple shipments from multiple carriers (currently UPS, FedEx, and USPS are supported).
  • – Real estate research.
  • – Flickr search engine.
  • – Feedication.com is a web application that acts as your own aggregation service. It is able to fetch and display information about you. It currently supports syndication with web services like 43 Things, 43 Places, 43 People, All Consuming, last.fm, del.icio.us
  • – Gradebooks, assignments, messaging and a personal website just for teachers.
  • – eVokeTV.com is focused on multi-tasking tv watchers – the growing population of users that have broadband internet connectivity while watching TV. Whether you are a passive viewer or actively engaged with the programming you watch, we strive to give you a
  • – Nonprofit film industry trade association devoted to promoting the film industry in Minnesota.

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Get This Blog Emailed To You!

RSS Blog & News Readers

I have yet to find an news reader that works to my liking. In case you don’t know, news readers are a piece of software or a web site that works sorta like an email program, except for blogs. Every time there is a new post at a blog you’ve subscribed to, you get a notification in your news reader. The RSS part is an acronym that stands for Really Simple Syndication, the technological protocol upon which blogs are based.

Since I track quite a few blogs, I’ve tried many news readers yet I’ve tried in vain to find one that I really like. I’ve tried software based ones like , , and a disasterous experiment with . I’ve tried web-based readers like and the but nothing has really worked that well.

FeedReader, for example, worked well enough at delivering blog posts as they came in, but I didn’t want another software program that was running all the time and when I’d close it, it was like out-of-sight-out-of-mind and so I’d forget about it. Plus, when it was running, I didn’t like the little pop-up messages that appeared from my systray whenever a new post came in; it’s already annoying  enough that does that whenever a buddy logs on or off. I don’t need more annoyance in my life.

The problem with web-based readers is that they pretty much defeat the purpose of RSS as a content delivery platform: You still need to remember to go to a web site to check your blogs, even if they are conveniently located in one place. Again, out-of-sight-out-of-mind.

But I think now I’ve found a service that does exactly what I need a blog reader to do: Send me an email when my blogs are updated. That’s what does. It’s a free service that allows you to subscribe to any content that provides and RSS or feed (you know, those little orange buttons you often see on web sites) and it will email you a notification when your subscriptios have been updated.

It’s as easy as copying a feed and submitting it to your FeedBlitz account.

I’ve set up a couple of accounts. I’ve got one for Twins and Vikings stories, so every morning I get an email with a link to and descriptions of all the new posts for the site’s I’ve subscribed to.

It’s awfully slick. So slick, in fact, that I’ve set up a subscribe box for this blog so you can get my posts emailed to you. If I skip a day, you won’t have to bother visiting. Look at the upper right-hand side of this blog and you’ll see the subscribe box directly beneath the Blog Tools heading. Just enter your email address, click Subscribe Me, and FeedBlitz will walk you through the rest.

Enjoy!

Technorati tags: rss | xml | news readers | rss readers | blog readers | email | feedreader | feeddemon | amphetadesk | onfolio | bloglines | google reader | feedblitz