News Alerts
News alerts and desk top news are offered by most news sites, often for free. You install a piece of software to have new news alerts and news items produced by these sites delivered to your desktop. An icon will ‘pop up’ when there’s news alerts to report. These services usually refresh themselves on an hourly basis, although you have to be connected to the internet – as with desktop feedreaders, it’s perhaps best for if you have an internet connection that is always ‘on’, e.g. if you have broadband.
Some examples of news alerts are: the
Guardian’s free desktop news alerts service and the
BBC also offer news alerts.
Personalisation
Personalisation is a key factor in getting people to come back to a search engine, by changing the look and feel of the interface beyond the search box. For example, you can customise the interfaces of the major search engines to provide you with additional information, tools, news alerts and services. If, as I do, you use a search engine often during the day, setting your personalised page to be your home page means that you get the added bonus of snippets of information from other websites and keep up to date with your news alerts.
iGoogle includes things like a wikipedia search box, a to-do list, BBC News (provided via RSS), games and the weather.
Try this out for yourself:
Go to one of the major search engines (
Yahoo,
Google,
Microsoft), or a tool such as
Pageflakes or
Netvibes, and customise the opening screen. Experiment to find the modules that will enable you to keep up to date. You will have to register – look for links to
MyYahoo, MyMSN, and so on.
If you are keen to improve your time management and get more organised then you may also find these posts useful on: RSS Feeds and Feedreaders and Social Bookmarking
Add a comment and let us know how you find these time management / news / social networking tools.
All posts in this ‘Keeping Up-to-Date’ series:
