Marsco Information & Research

I rely on Bloglines for reading blogs, but occasionally you come across a blog that doesn’t have a feed, what to do?  I’ve had a post about RSSPect sitting in my Bloglines saved items for over a year now so thought I should finally investigate.  RSSPect requires a simple sign-up process, and then automatically takes you to a page to create feeds from your own content.  If you want to create a feed from someone else’s blog, you need to click on the AnySite tab.

You insert the url and then choose what sort of updates you want, major and minor are the default.  If you choose all you will probably find out every time they change links, do something to the sidebar etc.  Once you’ve completed that page it takes you through the final stage, what you want to do with the feed.  I use Firefox as my browser and it is set to subscribe any new feeds automatically to Bloglines.  I clicked on the feed url and then was taken straight to the Bloglines page where I could set it up.  Simple!

I trialled using Habbo Hotel the other week, for an online discussion I want to hold for a work project.  My colleagues and I had a bit of fun coming up with outfits and dancing around the room.  Here’s what we thought:

• We liked being able to have ourselves represented as people, although it took us a while to work out how to move around.
• We liked being able to choose how we looked (to a certain extent).
• We liked being able to have a private room that was password-access only.
• We didn’t like that we could only use a limited number of characters in one go.
• We didn’t like that our speech bubbles disappear off the top of the page so you can’t go back and look at people have already said, if you are concentrating on writing something you might miss part of the discussion.
• We all found that backspace didn’t work when typing something in, maybe a technical glitch?  We were all using IE7.

To be fair, Habbo isn’t really set up to have meaningful discussions in, maybe most users don’t want that.  There was also an issue about getting a transcript, we would have to have a member of Habbo staff in the room at the same time to get this, I’m not sure what effect this would have on the conversation, even if they are not joining in, it’s a bit strange having someone standing in the corner.  Although it would be possible to use it for my project, I thought I’d investigate other options.

Fortunately that day Phil Bradley had blogged about Meebo Rooms - thanks Phil!   It sounded just like the sort of thing I was after so we had another trial, and this is what we thought:

• Meebo Rooms look like IM but are based online, this is familiar to lots of people making it easier to use.  I haven’t used MSN Messenger for few years (people kept wanting to talk to me!) but Meebo had the same feel and I got into it straight away.
• Although you can register, you don’t have to!  All I need to do is give the participants a url and password and they can log in.  They can also change their username from ‘guestxxxxx’ to something more meaningful.  Much, much easier than Habbo.
• It’s easy to scroll up and look at what has been said, plus the conversation is colour-coded according to who said what (you can also choose your own font/colour).
• You can personalise the room with an image or logo, giving it more of an official appearance.  In theory anyone could set up a Meebo room in our organisation name and download a logo from the website, so it doesn’t prove that we’re ‘official’ but certainly helps.
• You can share websites with each other.  As my project is about online social networking this could be very useful if participants want to illustrate a point.  It also means we can have our organisation website up to promote it and help with the ‘official’ feel.
• The only downside is that it hasn’t got the fun elements of Habbo Hotel.  However, I think Habbo’s cons would irritate people after a while to cancel out the pros.

So hopefully we will be using Meebo Rooms, and I’d recommend anyone wanting to do something similar to check it out.  Habbo appeals to the sort of person I need to recruit as a participant, but I don’t think our data will be as useful/interesting as it would from Meebo.

I’m currently trying to arrange a space for a virtual discussion group for a work project.  I’m hoping to use Habbo Hotel (due to the age of the participants, not because I think it’s great) but it may not be suitable so I’ve been looking at alternatives.  I’ve found most of them on I want to, but am always looking for more.  LibrarianInBlack mentioned Yugma recently, it looks good, but I don’t want my participants to have to download anything.

I’m hopefully going to trial Habbo this week (if they let me but that’s a whole other story) to see how it works for discussions.  Will everyone actually ‘listen’ to each other or just type their answers to questions over the top of each other?  Anyone had any experience of this?  Whatever I end up using needs to be simple and young-person friendly.

Will report back!

But after watching a colleague grapple with seating plans for an event recently, was pleased to find that there is a web tool to help us do this in the future: SimpleSeating.  It’s also free, and apparently very easy to use.

Brilliant!  Librarian In Black has linked to I want a Freeware Utility to…450+ common problems solved.  Find spyware on your PC, chat, burn CDs, add widgets to your site, budget, ooh, all sorts!  Great resource.

From the brilliant Lifehacker, some tools that help you work and communicate with colleagues in different buildings, towns, countries, planets…

As a public librarian I had a lot of computer documents to keep track of.  Disks didn’t allow much storage and we weren’t given pen drives (much cheaper now).  I tried using Yahoo Briefcase for a while but something went very wrong and I lost some work.  After that I took to just emailing myself stuff (not the greatest system when your network was prone to crashing, gosh I’m glad I got myself a new job!).

Online storage sites are becoming much more popular and if I was in the same position now I’d probably give one of the a go.  Whilst tidying up my Bloglines saved posts, I found one about Orbitfiles (thanks to I want to) and it looks pretty good.

The free account gets you 1000MB of storage and you can use it for backing up and sharing files as well.  There is also a tool you can download that will automatically upload and therefore back up your files for you.

Lazybase allows you to create a database online that can be accessed and edited by whoever you choose.  Because it’s online, this could be anyone from anywhere in the world.  Don’t expect anything on the scale of Access, but it looks to be a simple utility for contacts, books etc.

Via I want to.

Are you like me and faff about trying to make a neat flow chart in Word using text boxes and other swear-word inducing tools?

Swear no more!  Gliffy has arrived and allows you to create flow charts which you can then share on the web so colleagues can collaborate on them.  You don’t need to download anything, so you won’t be cluttering up your PC with more ’stuff’ and if work don’t like you downloading software, well, it doesn’t matter here.

Gliffy plan to have two pricing levels, a free basic level supported by adverts and an enhanced paid-for level.

Via LibrarianInBlack.

Something that I've seen various bloggers asking.  I instantly found a use for Google Spreadsheets as I don't have Excel on my home PC and have to keep a personal budget spreadsheet at work.  On a weekend I have to try and remember how much I've spent so I can enter it in on Monday to check I'm not spending too much (not always achieved if you're thinking this sounds too anal!).

Now I can keep my budget online and update it anywhere.  It's something very simple but I'm impressed.