Having taken part in the excellent 12 Apps of Christmas (for an interview with the creators click here), I finally got round to re-visiting some of the resources we looked at. As someone keen on current awareness (I read the news on my phone obsessively), I love this simple news aggregator, quaintly named Feedly. Basically you can easily follow any websites of organisations, youtube channels, companies and news sites using RSS feeds, and view their most recent content in one place.
I use Feedly in the simplest way possible. I went to the website at Feedly.com – which you can also download as an app – and looked for my favourite news websites using the search box. As a Law Librarian, the first sites I added were Times Law and the Guardian Law. To keep up to date with Business news, I added Harvard Business Review and one of the many Economist feeds. I follow THE for education news and a friend’s WordPress blog for fun. It’s very quick to set up and very easy to check.
The menu on the left hand side is a list of all the sites I am following – I can click on them individually to see their recent content, or click on the Today button to see all sites that were updated today. The search box in the middle allows you to search by topic or for a specific site, or you can browse by clicking on one of the subject options – although the results lean towards US material.
The site is clear and uncluttered, and you can click on the links to go directly to the original page.
There are lots of additional features – you can save directly to Evernote or OneNote, recommend or share sites, send links to colleagues or students, tweet articles… glancing through all the latest stories and updates can take as little as 10 minutes a day. You can create ‘Knowledge Boards’ where you can save key articles to go back to at a later date.
The main problem is that there’s no excuse to not knowing what is going on!
Bradford College Library Blog 