I found this chart via the sun light foundation. It is also available in Spanish (sorry could not find any French version). The large version has 8MB and can be printed out as a poster. It visualizes very good the different dimensions of web2.0.

I use a personalized Google homepage (iGoogle) which has a lot of web 2.0 elements in it and which has made my “information seeking” challenges a lot easier!

It is very easy to set up, no technical knowledge needed at all, and the result is a page filled with new resources coming right to me, instead of me having to remember to visit these useful sources of information every time I open my browser. It also saves me a lot of online time.

First of all, in the upper left hand corner (so in a very prominent place!) I have my Wikipedia search field. I used to use Google if I had any question like “what is Web 2.0” or “what is a mashup” but nowadays I use Wikipedia. In some sense I misuse it because it is an encyclopedia, not a dictionary. However the results I get are much more relevant than those I get from Google, and they are very trustworthy. Wikipedia rivals the mainstream encyclopedia’s in its quality, so you know you can trust what you read. As you may know this is quite revolutionary because Wikipedia’s content relies solely on the input of volunteers! It is in some sense an icon of Web 2.0. If you haven’t yet, try editing a page. It is quite an experience to do so. And you can make sure that your organization, topics of interest, etc. are represented in Wikipedia by adding this content yourself.

For personal use I had included a “countdown” which showed me how many days left until my vacation! This always made me very cheerful! Now that my vacation has passed I use it to remind me when my next deadline is for work.

But the bulk of my iGoogle page is filled with feeds from ICT4D relevant blog/news/resources feeds. For example, I keep an eye on the BBC’s technology news because often there is ICT4D relevant information. When I added this feed to my homepage, Google provided me with other related feeds, which led me to other sources I hadn’t thought of myself.

I also have the iConnect newsfeed, the Eldis ICT for development newsfeed and many more. These links above will lead you directly to the feed itself, which will display a lot of code in older browsers. If you want to see the content of these feeds in a legible way, and don’t want to use iGoogle, you can choose to use a news aggregator . I personally also use the add-on for Firefox called Sage but many people I know also use Bloglines. This may also be the more sensible choice than Sage if you do not always use the same computer. This is because Sage is part of your browser settings on your PC and Bloglines can be accessed from any computer you are working on with internet access. Of course the same is true for your iGoogle. There are many news aggregators out there, each with a slightly different interface, but the basics are the same. They provide you with a single entry point where content (via RSS feeds) from other websites are all displayed in one single place.

I’m interested to hear how other people are using RSS feeds to help them in the information seeking/filtering challenge we face today.