Google reader is probably the best RSS reader available today. Here are some tips and practices for power users (hopefully, you) to help you better manage your RSS reading time and leverage it, tweak Google Reader to use first and second level categorization, and optimize you RSS subscription list.

Use folders to prioritize your reading

At a certain point you've probably realize that it is just not possible to read all of the new items you get. One possible solution is to use folders to categorize your feeds. Once you categorized all your feeds, you can read prioritize your reading by urgency level. For example, I use a folder called 'Immediate' where I put feeds that I want to read the moment they publish something new because it is important for me to know about them as soon as possible. These could be work related or new trends, usually things that if no read within day or two (sometimes less), they became irrelevant. Other folders I use are 'friends', 'Podcasts', 'Premier Blogs', and some more. I also use a 'must read' folder for things that I want to read sometime, but it doesn't really matter when (such as family blogs or new WordPress plugins).

Continue reading “Google Reader Tips and Practices for Power Users” »

I’ve recently added a new tool to my information searching arsenal – Aardvark. I use Google, Google Reader, Twitter, my chat friends and other tools to find information. But Aardvark fills a gap these tools leave open.

Aard what?

At the end point (your side, as a user) all that Aardvark does is take a question you submit, find someone who can answer it and send you back the answer. It does that by searching for a user that is online and has knowledge in the field of the question you asked (and preferably, is from your network on Aardvark). Than it sends him or her question. The answer is sent right back to you, usually within few minuets. Often, you get more then one answers from several different people.

If you are not satisfied with the answer you got, you can easily resubmit it for other people to answer it or asked the ones that already did to elaborate.

Continue reading “Aardvark – Get High Quality Answers in Real Time from Real People” »

Two weeks a go I gave a lecture in a social media seminar. Now I’ve translated the presentation I used into English and made it easier to understand without seeing the actual lecture.

The presentation describes 20 social media practices that will help you in your daily life. It includes tools to monitor your web presence, ways to track interesting topics and conversations, methods to find people and to get answers, and more.

It revolves around the following seven categories:

1. People Database
2. Keeping in touch and more
3. Conversation
4. Search
5. Collaborating
6. Monitoring and News
7. Self monitoring

I’ll be glad to get your feedback and thoughts about it.

The Israeli Internet Association (ISOC-IL) is holding a Seminar entitled: ‘Social Media in Day to Day life‘ (more details in Heberew and translated to English via Google Translate).

Lecturers:

• Tomer Lichtash @tomerlichtash
• Me (@eyalsela)
• Miriam Schwab (@miriamschwab)
• Gal Mor (@galm)

The Seminar will take Place on July 15th at Tel-Aviv.

Microsoft Excel has a really cool feature that allows you to import data directly from a website. That feature is called “web query” and you can use it to integrate live information into your spreadsheets or just look at data and analyze it in a different way than it was originally presented on the website.

In this post we’ll learn how to built an excel query in a couple of clicks. As an example, I’ve created a single spreadsheet with the top 1,000 twitters (based on data from Twitterholic), which you can download.

Create an excel web query

1. Open a new Excel workbook.
2. Open a website and Select with your mouse the data to import. Copy it, and paste into the workbook.
3. At the lower right end of the pasted area you will see the “Paste Options” button, which looks like that . Click it and choose “Create Refreshable Web Query”.
4. A new window will open, called “New Web Query” (see image below) . Once it is done loading, little yellow boxes with an arrow inside them will show up. Click the arrow next to the data you which to import.


New Web Query window

Continue reading “Another Thing You Didn’t Know About Excel: Integrate Online data Into Your Spreadsheets” »

A few days ago, 38 information security experts submitted a public letter to Google, asking it to make Gmail more secure. More specifically, they’ve asked Google “[to] protect users’ communications from theft and snooping by enabling industry standard transport encryption technology (HTTPS) for Google Mail, Docs, and Calendar.”

Google responded saying it is “looking into whether it would make sense to turn on HTTPS as the default for all Gmail users”

If you don’t want to wait for Google to take the decision you can change the connection type to the more secure one (HTTPS) by yourself.

Change the connection type to HTTPS

To use always HTTPS connection in Gmail, do as follow:

1. Click ’Settings‘ at the top of any Gmail page.
2. Set ‘Browser Connection‘ to ‘Always use https‘ (see image below)
3. Click ’Save Changes.’

choose ‘always use https‘

Continue reading “Make Gmail More Secure By Setting It to Use HTTPS Connection” »