Thing 4: Information gathering

So time for some “information gathering”. Now, 23RTC is really offering up some research secrets.

• Feedly

I’ve been able to get a heads-up on Feedly as it’s pretty useful in my line of work drawing several Twitter (well, RSS) feeds together and allowing me to retweet them directly from Feedly. Using it like this it works nicely alongside other Twitter gathering tools like TweetDeck to enable me to, at a glance, keep up to speed with all the current science news stories.

• Pocket

I’ve registered for Pocket but have yet to properly populate it. It’s definitely “pretty”, feeling a little like a Tumblr for URLs. Up to now, I’ve made good use of the Bookmark toolbars but it’s nice to have a fallback because those can get pretty loaded. How useful it will be in the long term remains to be seen.

Having a little ponder over where it will fit in to my online habits, I think I’ll be using for short-term weekly to-read lists I inevitably compile. I can see how this would be really useful to academic researchers in particular.

• Zetoc Alerts

I’ve been using Zetoc for many years now and find it a particularly useful database for searching journals. At the moment, the Alert feature is definitely a tool that I would recommend but rarely use myself.

• RSS Feeds

These are wonderful things. Been using them for my music journalism, where keeping up with others’ writing is essential, but not so much in recent years. That symbol used to be the first thing I looked for but not so much now. Have they got forgotten over the years or is it the fact that Social Media has found a different way of integrating and personalising feeds.

I might have to consider getting an RSS option up on my own blog pages.