Great ideas for “passive” research
Perhaps your courseload prevents you from scanning 9 different websites daily for new items about the Greater Horn of Africa. Why not allow the power of RSS to do the work for you? Here are two tips:
1) Use Google News Alerts. Go to Google’s News Alerts Page. Put in the search term “Greater Horn of Africa” or something more specific, enter your e-mail, and it’s done! Google will e-mail you all of the Google News articles on that topic that come up.
2) get an RSS News Reader (also known as an aggregator) and let it retrieve the contents of various websites for you. If you have Firefox (and why wouldn’t you?), there’s a great addon called the Wiss RSS News Reader that does this well. There’s also lots of web-based and freeware RSS News Readers out there, just google them. Anyhow, almost every news source on the web has an RSS version, usually signalled by a little orange icon, or something that says “XML”. This XML page is what you put into the RSS reader. Everytime you tell the RSS Reader to update, it will immediate scan all of the websites you have given it, and give you all of the subject lines of every article, as well as showing you graphically which ones you haven’t read.
Does anyone else have great ideas on how to do research in this somewhat “passive” (or smart) fashion?
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Listening to the local NPR station is an excellent way to catchup on the news while you are driving around. Especially in southern california where there is always traffic! KPCC (FM 89.3) is my favorite station. The World is a great program for international news – it airs from 12-1pm on KPCC.