Previously: Part 1 – Google Alerts, Part 2 – Technorati Watchlists, Part 3 – Twitter tracking.

This article is about following Delicious bookmark tags using RSS.

In a nutshell: use your RSS reader to notify you whenever someone adds a bookmark to Delicious and tags it “eastdulwich“

Delicious

The website del.icio.us (pronounced as “delicious”) is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in late 2003, and was acquired by Yahoo! in 2005.
[Source: wikipedia]

Instead of using Firefox “Bookmarks” or “Favorites” (sic) in Internet Explorer, you can save URLs (web addresses) of the pages and sites you want to remember to your account on Delicious.

This means you can access your bookmarks wherever you go, rather than being tied to using the same computer.

You can also share your bookmarks, and see other people’s bookmarks. There is an optional setting to make any bookmark private.

When you save a bookmark you can add tags – or labels – to describe it, to make it easy to find and to group it with other similar bookmarks.

This also means that you can use delicious to track the tags you’re interested in.

There is an RSS feed available for all tags in delicious. Adding a tag’s feed to your RSS reader means you’ll be notified whenever your reader picks up a new item.

The page for all latest public bookmarks for East Dulwich is at http://del.icio.us/tag/eastdulwich, and the RSS feed at http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/eastdulwich.

As well as subscribing to feeds for tags you can also subscribe to feeds from people with accounts on delicious. My latest public bookmarks are at http://del.icio.us/beatnic and the RSS feed at http://del.icio.us/rss/beatnic

I have my own public delicious bookmarks automatically published to this website, resulting in posts with a title beginning “links for yyyy-mm-dd” (where yyyy-mm-dd is the date I saved the bookmarks).

Other social bookmarking websites are gaining in popularity – see this list on wikipedia – delicious is easy to use and one of the most popular, so should give a reasonable representation of what’s getting noticed on the web.

Previous articles covered Google Alerts and Technorati Watchlists.

This article is about Twitter and its tracking feature, using East Dulwich as the example subject.

Twitter

Twitter lets you share your thoughts with the world.

You can do this by text message (SMS), IM (instant messaging), via the Twitter website, or using a downloadable desktop application like Twitterific (Mac only).

Once you’ve set up your Twitter account you can start “tweeting” your updates. Sometimes called micro-blogging, it’s a bit like writing status updates in Facebook.

Your tweets will appear on your page on the Twitter website. My page is at http://www.twitter.com/beatnic and is public.

People who want to subscribe to your updates can become your “followers” – don’t worry it’s not as cultish as it sounds.

Your updates will appear on the Twitter public timeline. If you’d prefer not to be so public you can “protect” your updates – in this case people will need to request your permission to follow you.

If you’ve set yourself up with an RSS reader, you can add Twitter update feeds of the people you’re following.

People are using Twitter in all sorts of ways, including:

• The BBC tweets news headlines and links to the full articles on its website
• US presidential candidate Barrack Obama tweets about his campaign
• Transport for London tweets traffic updates (using a service called twitterfeed to convert RSS items to tweets.

Twittervision is a mesmerising website showing what people are tweeting right now, and where they are in the world. It’s a mash-up of Twitter – using a feed from the public timeline – and Google maps.

Tracking subjects on Twitter

One of the features of Twitter is the ability to “track” subjects.

You can do this using by text message (SMS) and IM. At the moment, this is limited to text message (SMS) only. [thanks to Andrew M for the correction - see comments]

Text or instant message Track East Dulwich to Twitter. You will immediately recieve a confirmation message.

That’s it. You’ll now receive updates for any public Twitter update mentioning the subject/s your tracking.

If you’re logged in to IM your updates will be by instant message only. Your text message updates from Twitter will be switched off until you log out of IM.

To stop tracking a subject, send a text or instant message with the words Untrack East Dulwich. Again, Twitter will send you an immediate confirmation message.

The rate of updates will very much depend on the subject you choose and the timing.

I’ve received one update for East Dulwich in the last three days.

Last night I tracked England and Croatia and received about 300 texts!

Cost of using Twitter with SMS in the UK

Sending a text to Twitter costs your mobile phone company’s standard text-message rate – watch out if you’re with 3 or T-mobile, according to this article on TechCrunch uk:

Note also that the 07624 in Twitter’s number (+44 762 4801423) means it is actually billed as “international” by 3 and T-Mobile, making it a pricey service for those who like to tweet via SMS.

Receiving text updates from Twitter is free in the UK. In the United States you pay.

The same Techcrunch article suggests a newly added a UK limit of 250 incoming texts per week.

In this series of short articles I’m going to run through a few things you can set up quickly and for free to follow what people are saying about the things you’re interested in. [Also in this series: Part 1 - Google Alerts, Part 3 - Twitter tracking, Part 4 - Delicious bookmark tags]

This article looks at Technorati Watchlists.

I’m using East Dulwich as an example, but you can do this for any number of subjects.

To get the most out of these tools and techniques, you’re best bet is to set yourself up with an RSS reader or aggregator. Don’t be put off if this sounds a bit geeky. The popular RSS readers are fairly intuitive to set up and free to use. For further information about RSS and how to set up a reader, see this page on the BBC website.

Technorati Watchlists

Set up a Watchlist on Technorati, and find out when somebody writes a blog post mentioning East Dulwich (or whichever subjects you choose). Currently Technorati tracks 112.8 million blogs on our behalf.

Technorati is a search engine which covers the “World Live Web” – a subset of the World Wide Web – and claims to be no more than 10 minutes out of date. Read more about how Technorati works here.

Setting up an account on Technorati is quick and free – look for the link titled “Join”. Once you have your account set up, here’s what you do:

1. Visit the Technorati Watchlist page
2. Enter your subject in the Add to your Watchlist box
3. Hit the Add button.

That’s it. You’re now watching the “World Live Web” for the subject you entered.

To view an example of what a Watchlist looks like for East Dulwich, click on the thumbail image below.

You now have 3 choices for keeping up to date with your Watchlist:

• Bookmark the web address for your Technorati Watchlist
  This is not the most efficient method, as you’ll need to remember to visit fairly regularly to avoid missing anything.
• Subscribe to the RSS feed for your Watchlist
  Using this method, your RSS reader does the work by regularly visiting your watchlist and looking for updates. Any new content will be listed in your RSS reader, a bit like new email in your inbox. Then you can scan this list in your reader whenever most convenient.
• Subscribe to an RSS to email service
  If you’d rather not user an RSS reader, you can always have updates emailed to you. Technorati doesn’t offer this service, so you’ll need to use another website to do this for you. I’ve set up an account on FeedBlitz – I will review this separately, but so far it has not scored high on usability!

Is anyone blogging about you? Why not set up a Watchlist for your name.

In this series of short articles I’m going to run through a few things you can set up quickly and for free to follow what people are saying about the things you’re interested in.

This article looks at Google Alerts.

[Also in this series: Part 2 - Technorati Watchlists, Part 3 - Twitter tracking]

I’m using East Dulwich as an example, but you can do this for any number of subjects.

As well as for personal interest, these techniques are useful if you want to keep an eye on what people are writing about your industry, company, product, service, or your competition, not to mention your favourite sports team, tv programme, pop singer… So if you work in marketing, product development, corporate communication, the press office, public relations – to name but a few – take note.

Google alerts

Google Alerts is a service which emails you when it finds a new mention of your chosen subject.

So rather than you having to search for East Dulwich every now and then, you can get Google to do the searching for you.

You can have alerts sent to your preferred email address, but you’ll need a google account (free and quick to set up) if you want to edit and manage your alerts.

Here’s what you have to do:

1. Visit google alerts
2. Type in the subject you want to track, e.g. East Dulwich or SE22
3. Choose the type of search you’d like. The choices are news, blogs, video, web, groups or comprehensive (an aggregate of recent results)
4. Select how often you’d like google to email you. The options are as it happens, once a day and once a week.

That’s it. Now you’ll never miss another mention of your chosen subject – as long as google picks it up of course.

You can set up as many alerts as you need.

The alerts are in the same format as the search results. They highlight where your subject is mentioned and link to the original source.

1. I am late. I will be there at
2. I’m at home. Please call
3. I’m at work. Please call
4. I’m in a meeting, call me later at
5. I will be arriving at
6. Meeting is cancelled.
7. Please call
8. See you at
9. See you in
10. Sorry, I can’t help you on this.

I’ve never used them. I’m not sure I ever will.

“Sorry, I can’t help you on this.” Seriously!

I mean they all seem to be written in some strange language from a bygone era. For starters they all have complete words and correctly used punctuation.

It got me wondering what templates you’d end up with if you went round asking people what text messages they send the most.

Count your opinions

Originally uploaded by Beatnic.

So I thought I’d add my input to the survey being run by London Underground on personal safety at Elephant & Castle tube station.

Unfortunately I didn’t understand how to use this “Opinionmeter” until I’d already started using it – at which point I had already mistakenly answered the first question.

I think the reason I got it wrong is because I expected it to be like a cashpoint (ATM), where the instructional text would appear on the little screen above the numeric keypad.

Only in this case the questions and instructional text are on the poster above the machine.

Being my usual self and therefore not reading the instructions I pressed the “1″ button, because that’s what it said on the screen.

A quick fix would be to have an highly visible label on the Opinionmeter itself pointing me towards the text above.

I really don’t understand the purpose of the screen at all.

I wonder how many other people this has happened to.

Better still, why not build it in to my ticket machine / Oyster top-up experience? Anonymity guaranteed of course.

If you’re interested in anything vaguely related to technology there’s something to listen to here.

I finally started catching up with some of my blog, news and podcast subscriptions recently and that coincided well with the arrival of my Nokia N95.

Some podcast stuff I’ve been listening to and would recommend includes:

• Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake telling the story of how Flickr started life as part of a massively multiplayer online game by Ludicorp and wound up becoming the darlings of the Web 2.0 world and getting bought by Yahoo! where she is now scattering the seeds of design thinking in everything there.
• Ideo boss Tim Brown talks in threes about design thinking – inspiration, ideation and implementation – and how it’s being picked up by big business.
• Irene Au, director of user experience at Google. On setting up a central user experience department, not biting off more than you can chew, and hiring T-shaped people.

I’ve just been sent this info about an event taking place in July. I’ve added in the link showing where the venue is on Google maps.

Title: Gas Organ exhibition
Venue: The Sassoon Gallery
Location: Blenheim Grove, Peckham Rye, London SE15
Date: 16th – 18th July
Time: Midday – 9pm
Cost: Free

On three sultry nights in July, the sepulchral vault of Peckham’s underground venue The Sassoon Gallery will reverberate to the eerily melancholic strains of the infamous Gas Organ.

The Brain-child of founding collaborators Lou Smith and Rufus Burdett, the Gas Organ is a fabulous musical instrument, able to play itself, or be controlled or played remotely.

Constructed from freely available plumbing, electrical and laboratory components, the Gas Organ is a fusion of Art, Science and Engineering, beautiful in its clinical appearance and mesmerising in its auditory effect. Witnesses of the event have their credulity challenged as they view the ephemeral chaotic turbulence of a flame producing such incredible range and depth of sound; how can a science lab experiment evoke such an emotional response as this? I am watching this, but I don’t believe it.

Weblink: www.experiment1.co.uk

I will definitely be checking it out.

He has been given some amazing presents, most of which make various electronic noises and tunes when bits of them are pressed.

It struck me that a lot of them don’t have an “off” button, or “parent button” as I call it. Some do, but many, like the fabulous Baby Einstein Animal Melodies, once they start you can’t do anything about it!

I was on the bus on the way home last week when I kept hearing a playful voice every now and then, followed by a little melody. And then 20 seconds later “Hug me”. It took me a while to realise the voice was coming from the John Lewis carrier bag at my feet containing the very cute and cuddly Fisher Price Laugh & Learn “Learning Puppy”!