Oh No! No More Google Reader! Now What?

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A few weeks ago Google announced that it was going to end the life Google Reader. Immediately there were cries from far and wide about the loss of a favorite tool of many. Watch the Google Hangout video with YALSA bloggers Wendy Stephens, Erin Daly, and me, Linda Braun, which focuses on options for those looking for a Google Reader replacement.

We’d love to know what readers are using to keep up with news, information, and so on. Let us know in the comments.

Resources discussed in the video:
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App of the Week: Personalized Magazines

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My first App of the Week review for YALSA was about Pulse, one of my favorite iPad apps for creating a personalized magazine from news feeds. Over the last several months several of this category of apps have launched. In this App of the Week column, I thought I’d change things just a bit and review a few of these apps (instead of reviewing just one for the week), note what is unique about each, and provide some ideas on how to choose what to use.

BroadFeed
Cost: 99 cents
This is the newest personalized magazine app with which I’m familiar. The idea is simple, use BroadFeed as a visual way to read through Tweets that include links. (The app only shows Tweets that contain links.) The setup is also simple. The first time you launch BroadFeed you type in your Twitter username and password and the app then imports the most recent postings from your feed.
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App of the Week – Pulse

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Welcome to YALSA”s new weekly feature App of the Week. Every Wednesday a YALSA blogger will review an app of interest to librarians and/or the teens with whom they work. If you have an idea for an app that should be reviewed, feel free to send it to YALSA’s Blog Manager, mk Eagle.

Name: Pulse
Platform: iPhone, iPad, Android
Cost: iPhone – 99’ยข, iPad/Android – $1.99

Pulse is a news reader for the iPad and smartphones that turns browsing and reading feeds into a visual experience. Read More →

Make Mine Visual

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I’ve been thinking about the presentation of information in visual formats for a long time. I’ve been thinking about how visual representations of information helps people to understand content. Word clouds are a perfect example of this. Being able to see a selection of content in a “cloud” so that words used a lot, or not much at all, stand out visually helps the viewer to understand the ideas of the content. Similarly, seemingly simple presentations of content in formats like Apple’s iTunes cover flow, not only makes the content “pretty” to look at, but also provides a simple opportunity to interact with the content by clicking through the covers to see what’s available.

Presenting information visually is not something new, but it is something that, because of advances in technology, is becoming more and more the way to do things. For example: Read More →