Finding Interesting Stuff

I recently created a dynamic page to grab RSS feeds from higher ed news sources. There are plenty more out there, and I'll probably create another page or two with different themes when I get the chance. For example, assessment deserves its own page. There are a couple more ways to find interesting stuff. These too can be automated, but it's not as easy.

Delicious.com (or del.icio.us) If you don't have an account here, it's a great site, and very useful for bookmarking with tags. The bookmarks live in the Cloud, and so are are available from anywhere. You can follow other people's tags (here are mine), creating a network of interested parties. The idea is that you can restrict searches to a group of experts in a field, so you get quality hits. This can even be automated to some extent.

For example, this link searches for the tags "assessment" and "higher_ed". At some point I'll see if I can filter the results with pipes.yahoo.com to create an RSS feed out of it. If delicious.com provides that service I can't find it.

Technorati.com is designed to index and search blogs. If you have a blog, you can register it with them, and it will be searchable as soon as you post a story. Searches can be tied to an RSS feed, so you can get the information with little effort. Here's a link for the same keywords as before from this source. Unfortunately, their RSS feed seems to be flakey--I haven't been able to get it to work for weeks.

When I get the chance, I'll try to automate these and a few more sources, and create some targetted higher ed topics pages.