All Things Interweb

In a humble attempt at educating the masses I thought I would give you a few tools to simplify your time on the interweb. Now I know there are some of you already using these tools, or tools very similar to these…please feel free to comment and add your opinion. But for those that know nothing of News Readers or Twitter or the like then this post is for you.

1. Download a RSS News Reader. The majority are free. This will allow you to “subscribe” to a website or blog (like this one). That way, you don’t have to visit tons of websites. You just launch your News Reader and it will download all the lastest news or posts from a particular site. In my opinion one of the best places to go for a News Reader is NewsGator (here). For Windows users you’ll download and install FeedDemon. For Mac users download and install NetNewsWire. It will already have some sites included, things like CNN or ESPN. You can leave these or delete them to your liking. Now, when you visit a site that offers a RSS feed (all blogs do) you’ll see a little RSS icon. Just click the icon so that you can add the feed to your News Reader. That’s it. Now you don’t have to waste your time visiting all the sites you like. Let your News Reader do it for you. Every time we update this blog you’ll see it in your Reader.

2. Get a good web browser. If you’re still using Internet Explorer 6 it’s time to update. If you’re partial to Internet Explorer go download IE 7. You can get it here. For a better browsing experience (on a PC) go get Firefox. It’s free and it’s here. If you’re on a Mac then you’re already using the best available browser…so you’re good to go.

3. Tons of people these days are on Facebook. It gives you an easy way to catch up with friends and family. I’m on Facebook. If you are then you can search for Brad Hamilton or search for this email: wbhamilton@pobox.com. Add me as a friend…you’ll then see any updates I make to my facebook account.

4. Popular, yet not quite as mainstream as Facebook, Twitter allows people to tell others what they are doing “right now”. Once you sign up for a free account you can “follow” others (and they can follow you). When someone “tweets” then you’ll see what they’re doing. I have a Twitter account, but I don’t update it very much. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/wbhamilton. If you’re on Twitter let me know your URL (or ID) so that I can follow you as well.

5. If you think of a blog as an online journal and Twitter as a minute by minute ticker of your day, then think of Tumblr as an online scrapbook. It’s not meant for big blogs, or things you want others to comment on. And it’s also not meant to manage the minute by minute updates that Twitter gives you. But if you have an article, or a photo, or a video, or some piece of inspiration, or a quick thought you want to share with others then Tumblr might be for you. I’ve just started to use Tumblr. My address is http://wbhamilton.tumblr.com which will actually send you to http://shorts.thelifeandtimesof.com. This site is not password protected. I won’t be using it to detail specifics about our work. It’s meant as a scrapbook. Let me know if you use Tumblr.

6. If you need to share pictures, Flickr may be the easiest way to do it. An account is free, you can set privacy on a single photo or a group of photos for friends and/or family, and it has built in tools to help you upload your photos. My photostream is here. Photos of the kids are not visible, so once you’re on let me know and I can add you as a friend.

7. Now I know what some of you might be thinking…if you’ve read this far that is…Brad, there is no way I can keep up with all this. And I admit, it might take a little while to set all this up. But I do have a way to keep it simple. And that’s by using FriendFeed. FriendFeed will take all the things you use (Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, etc) and keep the updates in one place. That way your friends don’t have to visit all 6 or 7 sites you use, they can just visit your account on FriendFeed to see what you’ve been doing with Flickr and Twitter and all the rest. And what’s better, you can subscribe to a persons account using a News Reader (see #1) and then you don’t even have to visit the FriendFeed website. So, for my FriendFeed go here, scroll to the bottom, click the little orange RSS icon and it will add my FriendFeed to your News Reader.

If you’ve managed to get through all that congratulations. Let me know if you have any questions.

Cheers.