Someone asked me how can I blogging about technology and keep myself up to date with technology, when at the same time I still working, spending more than 11 hours including commuting from and to the workplace. What’s more, I’m working in IT industry and my working time started after your lunch time and sometime after your dinner time (hope you can guess my working hours).
Well, there is no sophisticated tools, or scientific method that I use, except these 5 tools that I’ll elaborate below.
1. Twitter
Twitter need no introduction almost to everyone, it is the micro blogging service that taking the world by storm. What make Twitter is superior as news source is because, it got updated as a news broke out, or real time.
You know why? Twitter app is available in almost all smartphone platform, which means Twitter is accompanying the people wherever there go. Or , there are also SMS service provided by certain carries that let you tweet using your ‘regular’ phone, as long as it support texting or SMS.
In Twitter, these are 3 areas to look upon.
- List - Most useful of all. List allow you to organize information by grouping the twitter account you follows based on the topic. For instance, nowadays, more companies jump to Twitter and use their account as one of the vehicle in doing announcement, promotion or customer service. So here is where it make sense. Let say you want to follow telecommunication news, so group all twitter account belong to these companies under one list, called Telco for instance. Beside that, you can subscribe to the list the twitter account that you follow as well.
- Search - Use the search function to find the conversation about the topic that you’re interested
- Trending - The hot trend currently in Twitter. It can be manipulate using the hash # tag.
2. Techmeme.com
What is Techmeme. WikiAnswer best definite it as “Techmeme is a website that aggregates the top tech news stories from the most prominent technology oriented websites”. Techmeme is one of my favorite website, which has contributed to hundreds of posts I made in this blog. If you’re looking for tech tops news, beside Twitter, here is the right place to do so.
3. Google reader
Wikipedia define Google Reader as “Web-based aggregator, capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds online or offline” . So you have tonnes of website that you frequently read or you bookmark them for later read. It is almost impossible to visit these websites to read the new content daily. RSS reader such as Google Reader fill up the gap by allow users to subscribe to the RSS of that websites. You read, comment, share bookmark the content you find interesting within the Google Reader itself. All in one, is that beauty?
4. Google Alert
What is Google Alert anyway? The definition by Google - “Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic”. So let say you want to stay update on Nokia’s latest new, set ‘Nokia’ as the topic in Google Alert, which will send the to your email on the frequency that your comfortable with. Create as many as Google Alert to fit your needs. For me, I have dozens of Google Alert set up for different topic of my interest.
5. Smartphone with data service
Of all that I suggest above, this is going to be the most important. If you can afford it, go get one and you won’t ever regret it. Smartphone with data has 3 basic things that make it appeal to everyone.
- It is portable, fit in your pocket, light and the battery life is long lasted than.. let say netbook.
- You can get your email on the go, stay updated with your social networks through the social apps or webs and browsing website anywhere you want.
- This is all in one device you ever need.You can play games if you bored, listen to music, capture picture and etc, not to forget it’s main feature as communication device.
Most of the time, I read all websites stated above using smartphone, except when I’ve found the content and ready to write, I’ll switch to my notebook.
All 3 websites stated above has it’s own mobile version. The ‘normal’ website is tough to read in your smartphone. The mobile version of this website will show bigger font and convenient to be read from smartphone’s small screen. The mobile optimized website also usually simple and less cluttered, less graphic which mean it will load faster in your mobile web browser.
So you say you have notebook that got wireless broadband connection. It’s true that it offer almost the same convenient as smartphone, but imagine if you’re commuting a lot. You’re not full time blogger who have luxury of working from home; you spending a lot of time outside of your home. That’s where smartphone is what it is design for. Connecting you to the world of information regardless of space, time or border
TwitterGadget is Twitter client that you need if you’re really into Twitter. Unlike other client based Twitter client such as Thwirl, which is useful, but consume another memories and CPUs power, TwitterGadget lives on Gmail (and iGoogle or other app that support widget). You save more resources here.
