December 06, 2007
Final Blog about My Experience in BIT 330
I’ve found BIT 330 to be a particularly unique class compared to the rest of the curriculum in the business school. Although we’ve covered a few business topics within the class, it’s nothing compared to the endless amount of cases and balance sheets we cover in the rest of the classes. However, although these cases are valuable and help us students learn about business (hence, business school), I feel that I’ve learned a lot of applications in this class that I’ll be able to directly apply in the future, and frankly, I’m not so sure how much information from the Wal-Mart case I’ll be able to directly apply in my job next year. My point isn’t to bash the business school classes (obviously it’s a great school and I’ve learned a lot), but my point is that this class offers some great tips about how to find information that may or not be business related (everything from stocks to baseball batting averages), but the bottom line is, it’ll be helpful.
In terms of things I thought I already knew, I honestly felt I was pretty good at finding information by using the proper queries on search engines. I never realized that I was entering inaccurate queries and was actually making it harder on myself to find the information I was looking for. Instead of finding information in a matter of seconds, it could maybe take me up to a few minutes in order to find the proper information. Specifically, I knew how to use quotes to search for phrases, but I wasn’t aware of the number of syntaxes out there. Clearly, these syntaxes take what I thought I knew about syntaxes and the search process to a whole new level.
The main topic that I never knew I didn’t know was RSS feeds. I had no idea that you could set these feeds up and literally have information dumped into your feed aggregator. I’ve found bloglines (once again, didn’t know it exists) to be the best aggregator, especially because it’s web-based and I spend time on so many different computers. I’ve been able to use these RSS feeds for finding information for everything from hockey scores and stats, information regarding particular stocks, or even information about particular movie actors and their new movies they have coming up. All this information is aggregated, and all I need to do is check into my bloglines account every morning to find all the information I want as opposed to going to several different sites which would be a complete waste of time.
As I just mentioned, I feel RSS feeds are extremely useful and I certainly know I will use them going forward. Like I said in my initial paragraph, this tool isn’t necessarily business related (although it certainly can be and I’ll probably use it in this manner), but it can also be used for my sports scores and favorite movie actors as well. A second useful tool I’ll use going forward will be email alerts for different news stories. There are times when I want to be kept abreast of new stories (currently the new Tigers trade for Cabrera and Willis), and in the future, I’ll also be able to use email alerts for news stories covering business related topics as well.
Posted by jonjames at 09:04 PM | Comments (0)
November 11, 2007
Incoming Information
As the class begins to wind down, it’s pretty clear that RSS feeds are a center point to our projects. The great thing about RSS feeds is that they not only aggregate information and deliver it to a central location in an organized fashion, but they can be applied to several different types of information. By using XML language, I’ve been using RSS feeds for news sites, blogs, and even created some feeds by using Dapper.
For my personal project (My fantasy hockey team), RSS news feeds have proven extremely useful. I’ve used feeds from both Yahoo News and Google News in order to get updated news stories for each of my individual players. For each player I enter in the following query: “player name” “team name.” Originally I was just using the player’s name, but I was getting some news stories that weren’t relevant to my player. By adding the team name, my results became much more accurate. These stories are great because they provide both information about my individual player’s performance and also provide information that might not be quite as quantitative.
By using bloglines, you can create folders and keep your feeds pretty organized. Also, you can access your feeds from any location. Another valuable feature has been the capability to combine these feeds through Yahoo Pipes. Since I’m using two different news sites, I get two different feeds for each player. Yahoo Pipes allows me to smash these feeds together and in effect, cut my feeds and time spent in half.
The second type of information I’ve used feeds for are blogs. Blogs have proven useful because they provide information such as opinions and thoughts that a lot of news stories don’t provide. Since hockey and the NHL is such a big and commonly discussed topic, there are a lot of blogs that discuss NHL events. I’ve found that it’s difficult to find blogs that relate directly to my individual players, but a lot of blogs provide good opportunities to see what’s going on in the NHL in terms of the big picture. Once again, it’s valuable to use Yahoo Pipes to put these blogs together and once again save time. However, if you have a particularly few blogs by authors you enjoy reading or who provide better information, you might not want to combine this blog in Pipes (keep them separate). This is a personal preference and is completely up to the user.
The third way I’ve used RSS feeds is through Dapper. Specifically, I’ve used Dapper to create RSS feeds whenever there is a change in my players’ ESPN profile page, specifically in their stats. This is very similar to using WatchThatPage, which also alerts me when these pages change. I haven’t really noticed a difference between these two methods in terms of information delivered. But if you want to focus on using bloglines, you can create a RSS feed and store it on your site. If you use WatchThatPage, you would be required to begin using your inbox.
After a few months in this course, I’ve come to realize that RSS feeds are a huge part of this class and finding/ organizing information on the web. When used properly, RSS feeds can be instrumental in finding and organizing the type of information that normally you would have to go find instead of it being delivered directly to your RSS feed account. Furthermore, you can RSS feeds to have several different types of information (news, blogs, site updates, etc) sent directly to you.
Posted by jonjames at 06:50 PM | Comments (0)
