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!

Several months ago I used Meebo Rooms for an online discussion group for a research project I was working on. It was really successful (although due to the subject we attracted tech-savvy participants) and I would definitely use it again. I’ve blogged about it in the post below and I would definitely use it again as it is so easy and simple.

LibrarianInBlack linked to an article about adding Meebo’s instant chat widget to a library catalogue, seems like Meebo has loads of uses and this one is particularly good.  Can’t find something in the catalogue?  Chat to library staff online who can help you.

It’s ok, this isn’t going to turn into a Meebo fan site!  It could do with more content though.  Sorry.

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!

Another blogging break from Marsco, this time due to house move and lack of broadband.

I was showing someone Terapad (seen at I want to) the other day, it describes itself as ‘beyond blogging’, which it is.  It’s really more of a content management system, as it also comes with  PayPal shop facilities, forums, calendar, galleries, CV search etc - and it’s free.  It’s certainly something I would look into if I were selling something, and I can see that a lot of the craft and design blogs I read would benefit from using it.  If you go and have a look at the site you can find lots of examples of the different ways that people use Terapad.

Bloglines launched a new feature the other week, the Image Wall.  It’s basically a big mosaic made up of a variety of different images from RSS feeds.  It’s quite fun to watch for a while.

Unfortunately it meant that Bloglines was being inadvertantly blocked from some libraries and schools because there is no way of controlling the content of the image wall (it does come with a disclaimer though).  Many users told Bloglines about this and how they didn’t want to have to block the site but were faced with no option.

So what did Bloglines do?  They just moved the image wall over to a new url.  Simple yet brilliant, didn’t take a lot but makes a whole load of people happier.  You can see it here.

I read a stupid amount of blogs, and am always finding more I want to follow.  If it wasn’t for the mighty Bloglines, I’d never keep up.  Of course, there’s always the view that I should just read less blogs and streamline it down, quality not quantity and all that.  Not sure I’m ready for that just yet…

Another post that’s been sitting in my saved items on Bloglines is one from Phil Bradley, linking to a brilliant post all about Bloglines, and how to use it.  If you want to find out more about RSS and Bloglines, or know someone who does/should, go and have a read.

Hey there, long time no blog.

BlogHer featured an interview with Susie Hawksworth the other week, and her blog is definitely worth checking out if you want to know more about life in the voluntary sector and using open-source software. And she likes chocolate, and knitting blogs.

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.

Download the Congoo toolbar and you can access web content that you normally have to pay for, such as FT.com.  Anyone used it?

Via Peter Scott, been sitting in my Bloglines for several months…