Ref Tech Rob

I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago about using Twitter with Paper.li to create a focused daily paper ( link here .) I was impressed with its ability to gather together top tweets from people I follow and to lay them out in a readable format. I was also pleased to discover that, because my follow list is rather focused, what I ended up with was a nice summary of the previous days news in my fields of interest. Later that week, someone told me about Twittertim.es  (Twitter Times.) The Twitter Times is similar to Paper.li in that it collects links from my Twitter follow list and gathers them together in one easy to read newspaper format. There are a few differences that I have noticed since I started using both of them. The first thing that I noticed was a difference in timeliness. Paper.li pulls in some of the top tweets from the people I follow but it doesn't display them until the next day. Twitter Times updates its paper all day long. Now, neither approach is necessarily b...

Over the years, I have developed a few techniques to cope with the information overload that most of us deal with these days. Internet searches return millions of results, so I focus my search terms. My favorite sites are constantly updating their information, so I subscribe to their feeds in a feed reader. I bookmark hundreds of sites that interest me and I store hundreds of my own documents and thousands of email messages. When you throw in real time social services like Twitter and facebook, the information flow turns into a flood and it becomes nearly impossible to harvest the most relevant bits of information from your environment. There is a way, though, to simply harvest some of your Twitter gems with an interesting service called Paper.li. Paper.li is a service that culls the top links from your day's Twitter feed and organizes them into a newspaper-like format. The links are converted into short blurbs like article headers and are then organized into categories. You end up...

As readers of this blog may already know, I have been a fan of Google since its search engine burst onto the scene. It was fast, clean, and accurate and was quite a find for a reference librarian. In its early years, it was almost indistinguishable from magic. Later on, I fell for Google Reader, gmail, Google Docs, and I was already a Blogger user when Google took over that operation. I envisioned a day when I would be able to access my information from anywhere I had access to an internet connection, and Google Gears gave me hope that I would be able to access my most important items from my laptop even when I didn't have a connection. I also hoped that all of Google's products would tie together for easy information processing, creation, and publication. In Google's battles with Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook, though, this vision has disappeared. Google has become a "me too!" company that looks at innovation and tries to recreate it (or buy it) in piecemeal fash...