Organizing Your Goodies

Once you start seriously exploring the web and creating content yourself, it becomes a challenge to organize yourself and your content.  Where to keep everything so that you can find it?  Here are a few free online tools to help you get organized - and stay that way.

Bookmarking

Of course you can keep your bookmarks in your browser but then what if you want to share a set of bookmarks with someone else?  Or what if you're away from home, on someone else's computer and want to find that interesting site to show them?  The solution is to keep your bookmarks online.  Online bookmarking services allow you to store, tag, and annotate your bookmarks on a freely accessible web site.  Here are the most popular of those services:

Delicious  

Diigo

RSS Feeds

RSS stands for "Real Simple Syndication".  This is a way to recieve or send updates on regularly scheduled programming.  Think of it as a subscription - or as automatic syndication.  If there's a podcast series you like to listen to or a particular blogger you like to follow, you can sign up to be notified of anything new they generate with an RSS feed.  Notice in the upper right-hand corner of this wiki, there is a blue "RSS" symbol.  If you click on that, you will receive the RSS feed for this wiki.  So everytime it is updated, you will be notified.  Similarly, you can create an RSS feed on your own wikis, blogs, or web sites.  That way others can follow you.  

Personalized Start-Up Pages

These are great organizational tools. You can customize your computer's start-up page to include photos, weather, podcast RSS feeds, notes, to-do lists, recent searches, whatever.  Set one up and then you have a useful "home" to go to for storing links to everything else you need.

Here are a few of the best:

iGoogle

Pageflakes

Custom Search

How about building a small subset search engine yourself that would include just the sites you've deemed worthy or appropriate.  You can do that with Google Custom Search.  You identify the sites you want in your custom search, name it and then embed the "engine" in a blog or wiki for your students.  You can customize the look of it too - with your choice of colors, images, etc.