Back in 2006, I reviewed and posted a tutorial I had created about the GreatNews RSS Feed Reader. Well, after a three year hiatus Curio Studio has released a new version of GreatNews which is available without charge. While the user interface, hasn't changed much, it now officially supports Windows 7 and includes other internal improvements. As far as I'm concerned, GreatNews is still one of the best feed readers around, and you can't beat the price! My tutorial is still a great way to learn RSS and start having the filtered web come to you. If you've never utilized RSS (Really Simple Syndication) on your computer, read some of my posts from the RSS Category of this blog.

Sometimes it's amazing how data which has been buried in your brain for 40 years suddenly reappears. Most mornings, our company cafeteria posts a question on a bulletin board. People then write their responses on an easel … sort of a physical Twitter or microblog!

• Today's question: What was your science fair project?
• My answer (from the 1960's): The Convair 580 turboprop engine!

While 40 years ago, a budding technologist like myself needed to escape to the public library to do research using technical journals and science texts, today I have Google! Thus, here are my favorite links of the day!

• From Herman the Duck: History of North Central Airlines, The 580.
• From Wikipedia: The Convair 240 Family.

Question of the day: What was your science fair project? Leave a comment / link!

(click upon the image to view full sized / resolution)

And I flew many miles via North Central …

All my chemistry friends should take a look at this free new add-in from Microsoft, Chem4Word. Microsoft Research describes the free tool in this manner:

The Chemistry Add-in for Word is a tool for writing and rendering
semantically rich chemistry information in Microsoft Word documents.
This project is a partnership with Peter Murray-Rust of the University
of Cambridge.

In addition, everyone may be interested in the Math Ad-In for MS Word.

People often like to talk about old vs new media. What are the ramifications?  Are the news stories the same? While I don't pretend to have the answers, I did decide to use a "new age" web tool named Wordl, which takes the content from any web page (or text you submit) and builds a graphical representation. In other words (or in other Wordls), this service turns text into a graphical representation.

Thus, I bring you the news as reported on March 29, 2010 at 6:45 CDT from:

• The NY Times (the old)
• CNN (the in between)
• Google News (the new)

In the case of each media site, I used their "vanilla" United States root page (i.e. no user preferences). I thought it would be intriguing to compare a news service / web site which is built upon an old line newspaper (NY Times), a web based new age media site (CNN), and finally a computer service built news service (Google News). The only comment I'll make is that CNN and the NY Times seem to present less content and stress some items more on their home pages (number and size of graphics). I'll let you draw any other conclusions yourself. Thus, here are the three Wordls: (click upon any image to view full sized)

NY Times

.

CNN

.

Google News

Although I've been a HUGE advocate of RSS technology over the years via this blog (still am), I realize that Twitter is here to stay. Like many of you, I've experimented with Twitter and am still learning the value proposition. I have found that one Twitter List which I have created, my Research List, has been a great way for me to stay informed about new reports in the knowledge domain of collaboration, systems and technology. I've restricted the membership to high quality research groups. I've included the initial list below along with their Twitter account links. Any like groups I should add, and why?  Thanks. 

NorthstarNerd Twitter Research Group:

• APQC
  (American Productivity & Quality Center)
• Burton Group I.T.
• EcolLab
• Forrester Research
• Gartner Research
• IBM Alpha Works
• MIT
  Sloan Management Review
• Microsoft Office Labs
• Pew Research