Rather than post an excited rant about Google Wave, the upcoming communication system to end all communication systems, and what it could mean for us, I’m just going to link to the excellent rundown on Mashable:
http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-guide/
Read and anticipate. If you find that even halfway interesting, be sure to check out their other Wave posts as linked to at the end.
With Information Services’ Facebook page now boasting almost 200 fans a short while after its release, I thought it’d be interesting to investigate our presence in other social media - even if we’re not active in a particular area at this time, our users certainly will be.
To that end I’ve set up a shared folder on my Google Reader account that watches for mentions of the University in general (restricting it to Information Services would have been a little optimistic at this stage) on Google News, Google Blog Search and Twitter. Sadly I don’t think it’s possible to bring Facebook into the equation due to their privacy model, though anyone would certainly be able to share our new list on their Facebook account.
I tweaked the blog search to exclude those blogs we publish ourselves, as the idea here is to see who else is talking about us. There are probably a few off-site ‘official’ blogs that will need adding to the list - let me know in the comments area if you’re aware of any. Similarly, please chip in if you think there’s another resource that should be added to the three already in place on the list, or with any other ideas you might have.
Anyway, you can view the results as a common-or-garden web page: UoN References - and, as you’d expect, you can subscribe to that page as a meta-RSS feed to bring these search results into your own feed reader / browser / mobile and receive updates when new results appear - which is probably more often than you think.
It’s early days and basically a rush job, but if the University is mentioned in the news or on the web there’s a good chance this tool will pick it up. Useful? Promising? Incomprehensible? All feedback is welcome.
SET MINDS TO BLOWN: Here’s a brainmelting and substantial archive of International Times, the UK’s foremost underground periodical, offering beautiful per-page scans (and text versions, making the archive searchable) spanning three decades of psychedelic counterculture madness. And here’s an issue guide on the official IT site to help you dig up articles of interest, of which there are thousands.
See also my old post about The Realist archive if this somehow leaves you hungry for more.