It’s hard to grasp the amount of information out there for you to discover through this ocean of data we call the Internet. You could literally sit at your computer and read for the rest of your life without eating, sleeping, or addressing nature’s call. Sometimes this thought can be rather intimidating. To help ease some of that informational overload anxiety I’m going to review a couple of things that everyone should know about in order to have a quicker and more convenient Internet experience.
1. Browser Extensions and Themes
Many of my friends are still using the default browser theme with no extensions or add-ons. The conclusion I came to was that most people don’t want to invest the time. Hopefully I can convince someone out there that this is worth your time and effort. Whatever browser you are using (If you are still using IE or AOL please join the Firefox or Chrome bandwagon) they will have add-ons or extensions that you can download. A simple search should get you where you need to be. Personally, I have spent at least 20-30 hours reading reviews on extensions or add-ons as well as testing them out. I’ll go into further detail on extensions and which are my favorite in my next blog, but for now try to dedicate at least a few hours to reading reviews and testing out different extensions. Extensions are constantly updated and being added so check on this often, because some of these extensions will truly enhance your Internet experience forever!!
2. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) & Feed Aggregates
RSS is a format for bringing you all the latest updates updates from the web. Most websites have an RSS feed that you can subscribe too in order to find out about their latest content. For every website that you visit frequently look for the little orange symbol you see pictured on the right ————–> and subscribe to the RSS feed. Set up these RSS subscriptions into a Feed Reader or News Aggregator such as Google Reader or My Yahoo. If you found the Feedly extension you can use it as a pretty nifty feed aggregator. These feeds are an absolutely indispensable tool for organizing your Internet experience. If you spent some time exploring the different extensions your browser offers then you might find an RSS extension that will usually provide you with a one click RSS subscription to any webpage.
3. Social Media Desktops & Social Media Aggregators
Your probably on Facebook by now…perhaps MySpace, Flickr, or YouTube? What about AIM, Google Buzz, Delicious, Stumble Upon, Twitter, Digg, Last.FM, Pandora….well, you get the point. Most websites are social whether you knew about it or not. With such an enormous amount of social media websites available to us it is highly recommended that you manage those profiles from one source. A social media desktop will help you do just that. For my social media Desktop I’m using Hootsuite which you can see pictured below. It has some really nice features, but your probably not going to want something so overwhelming at first so for first timers I would recommend trying Digsby. It’s very simple to use and incorporates many of the common social media applications.
A social media aggregator works just like a news aggregator, but with emphasis on sharing with friends. Here is a a PC World blog detailing 3 social media aggregators, and if you want my recommendation go with FriendFeed. To be honest I recommend FriendFeed because it’s the only one I’ve tried, but I’m sure that any of these three will suit you well. Instead of “friending” people here you “subscribe” to them. Now you should look for like-minded people who have Feeds you like and subscribe to them. You can start with me, Michael Dillinger! 
4. Blogs
This is probably the hardest option to convince people to participate in. A Blog is short for a “Weblog” so you could easily make the argument that Facebook is a blog. Twitter is another good example. It is considered a micro blogging service so if you’ve tweeted before you were technically blogging. Seeing as how we’ve established that you’re already a blogger why not take it to the next level? You don’t have to be a writer in order to create a memorable blog. Anyone can do this, and I’ll prove it to you with some examples. Here’s your blog title: “The First 3 things I do every morning”, or how about “5 Most Common Reasons I Get Road Rage”, or if you want to get really cheesy you could be like my first blog where I blogged about creating a blog. To take your Bloging to the next level my personal recommendation is WordPress. You can design entire websites with WordPress, but your going to need some serious dedication for that so just try blogging for now. Getting a basic blog will not require any HTML knowledge just look at the picture below and maybe you’ll see how embarrassingly easy this is. The hardest part is finding good images to compliment your blog, but the use of images is fun and bring life to your blog….just be sure not to over do it. If you want you can send one RSS feed to your Facebook profile. This Blog is setup to feed into my Facebook profile in the note’s section as well as a wall post announcing this activity. If you want to set up your RSS feed this way then click here.
5. Social Bookmarking
Everyone should know what it means when something goes “viral”. You can thank social bookmarking for that. You’ve used these sites before: Digg, Reddit, Delicious, or StumbleUpon. These are all social bookmarking sites and if you can get enough people to bookmark your webpage on one of these sites your chances of going viral have dramatically increased. Digg is so popular that getting a top ranking in Digg can crash your website from the traffic it could generate. That’s why these applications are so important and I urge you to participate. I used these sites for a longtime and never bookmarked anything! Create your profile and start bookmarking your sites now…You could be the one who breaks the next viral story on the web. Start with this blog….click on one of the social bookmarking icons you see below to submit my blog. You can get some good practice in and I’ll get to do some shameless self promotion 
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