Archive for April, 2005

OhmyNews looking for citizen journalists

Welcome to the revolution in the culture of news production, distribution, and consumption. Say bye bye to the backwards newspaper culture of the 20th century.

With those words the popular Korean news site, ohmynews is inviting citizen journalists for their international English edition.

Now you can register as a citizen reporter with our new English login system! Keep track of the number of people who read your stories, readers comments and the cybercash you earned. The registration process is quick and free. A FAQ and step-by-step slide show (PowerPoint) will help you get started. OhmyNews is looking forward to receiving stories from your part of the world.

The mysterious exploding toads

Just spotted on Y! news - Exploding Toads Puzzle German Scientists

The toads at a pond in the upscale neighborhood of Altona have been blowing up since the beginning of the month, filling up like balloons until their stomachs suddenly burst.

“It looks like a scene from a science-fiction movie,” Werner Schmolnik, the head of a local environment group, told the Hamburger Abendblatt daily. “The bloated animals suffer for several minutes before they finally die.”

Wikipedia has more on the exploding toads.

Using Bloglines (or How to keep up with dozens of blogs everyday)

Update: Already getting lots more tips from friends. I will keep updating this post.
Thanks to all who commented and linked to this post.

I follow about 80 blogs on a regular basis. I read about 10 online news sites. I am following some Flickr sites and some Yahoo!discussion groups too. If I were to go to each of these sites every day, it would take up lots of time. Also, I might go to some blog and find that it is not updated. It would be good to have a service that keeps track of all our favorite blogs.

The developers of popular blog services started building features on their software that automatically generate some thing called a RSS feed. (This file has information on the latest additions to the site’s content and this file is usually stored in a format called XML. For example click here to see my blog’s XML file.)

Most blogs and increasingly news sites, search engines and other web services are publishing these RSS feeds. People also started building tools called aggregators (also known as Feedreaders and Newsreaders). Aggregators can collect RSS feeds from many sites and present the fresh content from these sites on single page in a format that we can read.

One of most popular aggregator today is Bloglines. Bloglines is web based, you don’t need to download any software to your computer. Just create an account on their website and subscribe to your favourite blogs. You can then follow your blogs from a Mac at home, a Windows PC at office or a PDA at some airport.

This tutorial will show you how to sign up and subscribe to blogs with Bloglines. We will also show you some other interesting things you can do with Bloglines.

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