I’m late to using Web 2.0 Internet research tools, but they’re just so danged good I can’t not share. Two of my latest discoveries are especially good for research, Del.icio.us and Google News Alerts.
Delicious is a social bookmarking site that lets you tag and store Web pages on their site. You can share pages with other Delicious users, but that’s not the main way I use it. Before when I researched a story, I would find data on a topic, and then highlight, cut and paste the info to a Word file that I’d fill with clips. Now, I just tag everything and save it on Delicious. I tag everything with keywords that will help me find it again. Then, when I start to write, I open my story file in Word, and my browser window, use a function of Windows to tile the two windows horizontally and switch between my research file and my Word document.
Another way to research a topic is through Google’s News Alerts, a part of Google’s News search function. With this service, research comes to me. Sign up for News Alerts on specific subjects and Google will crawl news sources or blogs and drop what it finds into your email inbox once a week, once a day or instantly. You can set alerts up for multiple topics and track each separately. To set up alerts, click on the News Alerts link on the left-hand column of the Google News page and follow the directions.
Okay, okay. After dragging my heels on trying yet another “social networking” item , I tried del.ic.ious. Part of me hesitated because of the idiotic use of periods.
Now that I’ve tried it, I’m hooked. Who needs bookmarks when you have this? I stopped bookmarking sites a long time ago because I couldn’t keep track of them all, but the keywords allow me to tag a link in so many ways I’m actually using the service. And it’s easy to do. No huge learning curve.
Thanks for the push! I owe you one!
Charmian: I couldn’t agree more about the value of Delicious, periods or not! I don’t take advantage of the social networking end of the service – I don’t browse other people’s bookmarks, for example. But I love the rest of it. Thanks!
Michelle Rafter