Jon Jolly

Following on from my last post about the use of new technology in youth work, you might be interested in using Google’s updated Trends feature.

Google Trends can be used to see how popular certain search terms are across geographic regions, cities, and languages.

Working just like it’s standard search engine, Trends gives you visual data to see what’s hot and what’s not. For example, if you want to see how popular Facebook has become over MySpace in the UK during the past 12 months, just type in “Facebook, MySpace” and hit enter!

This could be a pretty useful and powerful tool for finding out what people are interested in. I love the way you can now filter by certain regions as well as country to see how popular Rugby has been in Wales over the last 4 years.

What uses can you think of for this Trend search?

This Yahoo! service has been around for a little while now, but I’ve only just started to get to grips with it. It’s basically a powerful tool for getting the information you want brought to you from around the web. If you get bored with technical stuff, read no further…

For the rest of you, Pipes is a great way to mashup RSS feeds (you know, the bit that broadcasts your content across the web everytime you update your site). From Yahoo!:

Pipes is an interactive data aggregator and manipulator that lets you mashup your favorite online data sources. Simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs:

• combine many feeds into one, then sort, filter and translate to create your ultimate custom feed.
• geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map.
• remix your favorite data sources and use the Pipe to power a new application.
• build custom vertical search pages that are impossible with ordinary search engines.
• power badges on your web site.
• extend your web site by accessing the JSON or RSS output from Pipes.

So far I’ve only managed the simplest use of Pipes which is combining, sorting and filtering feeds to create my own custom RSS. I generally read most blogs or news items in Google Reader. Every time I find a blog that I want to read regularly, I subscribe to it and tag it with a category (E.g. ‘Tech’). All the blogs that I read to do with Christian youth work ministry, I tag ‘YM-blogs’ and then can always find updates under that heading. Google Reader has a great feature that allows you to create an RSS feed of any tags you’ve created. Here is the feed for ‘YM-blogs’.
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/15039631766755983999/label/ym-blogs. It’s basically all the youth work blogs that I read pulled together into one feed. You could subscribe to this if you wanted.

With Pipes, rather than copying all the feeds of those blogs one by one, I created a pipe that takes my ‘YM-blogs’ RSS feed from Google Reader and then searches it for the word ’school’ or ’schools’. It then arranges posts by date and throws them out the other end in a new RSS feed. Here is the result: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=KqQhe2gh3BG6htu8nkartA&_render=rss

All this is quite clever, but it really comes into it’s own when you can search for houses available to rent in a certain area and have the results overlayed on a map! However, what I really love about Pipes is the visual interface. You drag and drop different modules and then connect them together with ‘cables’. It’s kind of like creating a marble run. You can see my simple example of how I put this together with different modules here (you’ll need to sign in to Yahoo!).

The whole thing is a bit geeky (I love it!), but there is potential to find and sort hundreds of pages of information relevant to youth work and ministry. Once I’ve created a useful pipe, I’ll let you know!

I’ve added a couple of wordpress plugins to this site today that relate to blogging and browsing on the move.

WP-Cron works with a pop3 email account (and the built-in wordpress functions) to post any emails it recieves straight to the site. This means I can write a post on my phone and email it to my secret address, knowing that it will soon appear on my site! Handy for blogging at a youthwork conference or in church

WP-PDA is an excellent plugin that reformats wordpress pages for PDAs and mobile devices. It needs absolutely no configuration and means I can now view my blog perfectly on my Sony-Ericsson K800i while out and about (Not that I’d want to read my own blog, but you get the idea…)

Alongside the ability to email photos straight to my Flickr account, upload videos to youtube, and syncronise my Google Calendar, I can now get a lot done with my humble mobile phone!

I’ve been using Google’s Gmail service for some time now because it offers some excellent features that competitors don’t. POP access for collecting your mail through another email client (Outlook etc), 2.5GB of free storage, powerful search, filtering, and sending mail from multiple addresses.
Then I recently started using ‘Google Personalised Home‘ as my homepage because you can customise it to display your Gmail inbox, your bookmarks, and as many rss feeds as you like. I’ve got feeds from BBC News, Slashdot and Empire as well as the latest weather, Movie listings, music reviews and friends Blogs on my homepage everytime I start my browser. Plus I can log-in anywhere in the world!

Well now the Google rumours appear to be true, with the leaked internal report of Gdrive. Currently in development, Gdrive promises to be an unlimited amount of online storage to keep all your files, music, media within easy reach anywhere you go. A definite advantage for certain things, yet be sure to keep personal/sensitive documents away from such online storage ideas as many have been quick to point out that if Google can’t even keep their own files secure, why should we trust them with ours?

Oh, for all you hotmail users, Microsoft have launched various aspects of Windows Live where you get massively increased storage, a personalised homepage, an improved search facility, plus local maps and directions, among others. Sound familiar?