Earlier today I watched a screencast tutorial on Google Calendar … the tutorial is nicely done, and more importantly has made me want to convince my wife to move our family calendar from Yahoo to Google. As a fyi … I learned of the tutorial via RSS. The Learning By Screencast is also indexed in my custom screencast search engine.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Keeping Yourself Current via RSS
If you’re reading this blog, but not using RSS, why?? ! Even if you don’t subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed, you really have no excuse for not learning RSS and creating your own personal knowledge base. Quite frankly, compared to those of us who effectively use RSS, you don’t stand a chance in the competitive world for jobs. RSS allows me to process more information faster … specific to my intellectual needs … than you. Think of it as a sort of "personal VPD" (velocity product development). Knowledge is power.
Okay … what got me on my soapbox? My answer: the University of California at San Diego! Their technical library recently brought online the most phenomenal listing of RSS feeds from engineering journals and magazines I have ever seen … over 700 links. I hope these links are loaded into a database web engine; I would hate to have the job of manual link generation and checking.
If you are new to RSS, here is some background data:
And from my blog …
- Creating Custom RSS Feeds – Screencast Tutorials
- RSS Trends and Topics
- RSS Feed for eContent
Second Life Training (get a life!)
Some of you may remember that my avatar’s name in Second Life is Ole Northmead. Well … if Ole wanted to upgrade his software skills, he could skip on over to Thomson NETg’s advanced software skills complex!
- A Software Complex Training Tour (youtube screencast)
- Your Tour Guide’s Second Life Initiative (i.e. Doug Bassett of NETg)
- What Is Second Life
If you have been wondering what this is all about … if nothing else, watch the youtube screencast. NETg has built an actual virtual training center in SecondLife.
Social Bookmarking … Now or Never??
Creating an effective online community is a challenge. The biggest complaint I hear in this arena … I can’t find content within my own company. Put another way, how do you assist the knowledge transfer (VPD) process if an engineer or marketing representative in Kansas has no idea about work being done in Nevada (or Shanghai)? Here are some reviews of social bookmarking services which may help you solve this dilemma.
Just yesterday IBM announced a new entry into this field: Lotus Connections. Here is a podcast link from IBM’s DeveloperWorks series … "Carol Jones: IBM Fellow talks about social networking, advances in collaboration, and the tools growing up to facilitate them" (podcast link)
Finally, my thanks to the CEO of ConnectBeam, Puneet Gupta, who emailed me the link to the bookmarks review.
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An update to this posting may be found here
When is a Widget a Gadget?
Answer … when you’re Microsoft. However, the trend of creating small software applets that easily install on multiple devices is a good trend. This blog incorporates many widgets … my Feedburner RSS feed, LinkedIn profile link, and Google search box are all examples of widgets. None of these widgets were provided by Typepad, my blogging platform, but the single click install made adding them dirt easy. Thus, here is a very good screencast on using C# to develop gadgets for Windows Vista. If you’re involved with software development, you need to understand this concept.
Finally, want to avoid the Microsoft world? Do a search on Ajax using my Screencast Search Engine.