Now What?

Well, I have completed the next step in my training-- namely, to research RSS feeds and create one of my own. This, I feel, I did with moderate thoroughness and a surprising amount of success (meaning moderate success). It was actually fun to go around clicking "Subscribe" to everything, knowing that I'm not going to get a huge bill a month from now. Anyway, I got my minimum number of feeds and I can check that off the list.

But now what?

Well, I guess now I have to go to my Google Reader account to get the compilation of feeds. That's awesome, except I'm not in the habit of doing so, and therefore I haven't yet remembered to make use of it. Of course, it's been more difficult than usual to remember the last two weeks... because for that time my home internet has been down and my only contact with cyberspace has been in miniature frenzied sessions on whatever computer I can find, therefore making my short forays the equivalent of runs for medical supplies: essentials only.
But I digress.

Anyway, this does seem to be a good tool. I can pick and choose which sources I like for my information, and this program will automatically combine new updates from those places on one neat site for my convenience. If I do get in the habit of using it, I think it would be very efficient (more so if I used it for work). The only downside I actually saw was that the site's navigation wasn't intuitively obvious. The only function-related problem I can imagine, not having yet had extensive experience, is that RSS feeds might only prove useful if I'm looking for brand new stories, rather than archived ones. Other than that, thumbs up!

Motley Mashups

I'm still not entirely sure what a mashup is, but just knowing that they exist has already put me way ahead of my previous learning curve. As of right now, I'm getting the impression that mashups are peripherally connected to some larger site, in this case Flickr, and that they find innovative ways to search, categeorize, and use the information from that site.

The ones I liked best were the map and color search functions. The first allowed me to search Flickr photos by location on a world map, while the second made it possible to search all photos in a specific color scheme. Not only could they be incredibly useful, but to be honest, I really liked them because they're pretty dang cool!

Of course, there are a few drawbacks to each approach. For the map search, the relevant photos will only display if they have been tagged or if the features in the photo are distinctive enough to suggest a location. For the color search, while it makes it easy to find monocromatic photos with one dominant hue, multicolored photos without an overarching color scheme will fall by the wayside.

Still, these are two very impressively inventive ways to look for information on the net. I like that someone was thinking outside the box. Specifically, the "search term" box.