popurls, here I come..

Steve Rubels picks popurls as the the best web site of 2008. Here’s why:

Popurls calls itself “the dashboard for the latest web-buzz, a single page that encapsulates up-to-the-minute headlines from the most popular sites on the Internet.” The site was created by Thomas Marban. What it basiscally does is aggregate web sites all in one place – digg, delicious, news sites, Techmeme, key blogs, media sites (Flickr, YouTube, etc) and much more. The great thing about it is that you can easily personalize it to your tastes. As you use it, the site gets smarter and shows you recommendations. You can view stats for the web site here.

So why am I nuts about Popurls? There are many reasons…

• It’s a digital curator that helps mitigate the Attention Crash
• It underscores that the world is flat (Thomas is from Austria)
• Popurls added a ton of features this year: you can sign in with Open ID or your Google Account, sharing, a live view and a cluster view, a deep archive, a zeitgeist and much more. He seems to be adding features as fast as Gmail and Friendfeed.
• They’re also on Friendfeed, Twitter, Facebook, mobile devices, the iPhone and even the Wii.
• Popurls Live – track it in real-time like Twittervision.
• And finally, killer search – complete with search feeds.

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personal portal pages

There are two fun personal portal pages I’ve been playing with lately. One is iGoogle, the other is Netvibes.

You need to set up an account for both (obviously) but I found Netvibes to be the faster of the two to set up. With iGoogle, you are limited to their services (which is nothing to sneeze at, really: Gmail, google maps, et cetera). With Netvibes, you get to pull in RSS feeds from any website, plus display Flickr search results (search for “the adventurer” and you’ll see our wonderful hand model) and display any iCalendar you subscribe to – plus a whole lot more.

Have fun portal-ing!

Many thanks to Katie Vale of DUE’s Office of Educational Innovation and Technology (OEIT) and Jeff Reed from IS&T’s Departmental Consulting and Applications Development (DCAD) for this post idea.

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Yahoo! Pipes….

Yahoo! Pipes is a service that lets you combine different web feeds to create your own personal aggregate. You pipe data in, then mash it up…the result is a single rss feed that you created with a few clicks – no programming knowledge required.

From their overview page:

Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code.

For example, YouTunes is a pipe which links the top 10 songs from iTunes with videos from YouTube. Created by Nick Bradbury, check out his site for a step by step breakdown on how he did it.