Whenever you wish to research upon a topic, or share the something with others, there are many handy online research tools available at your disposal. More than that, it is necessary to keep yourself up-to-date with the latest happenings in the online world, so let’s see some of the easy ways to remain updated without spending a lot of time.
Overview
These online research tools can be categorized as follows –
- Finding New Seeking
- Viewing information
- Subscribing to information
- Comparison of the popularity of topic
- Writing
- Information sharing
- Networking with peers
Some of the best ways to keep in touch with latest happenings are described below –
Google Alerts – E-mail Topic Alerts Service: Google is definitely one of the fastest ways to find the information online about a particular topic and any relevant information about a particular keyword. But, the actual effort to be done is here because as soon as some set of pages are retrieved, one feels to look into the links as they are. Using the available services of alerts is the best way that gives control. Snippets of relevant can be delivered to a person in his/her mailbox by Google alerts service, according to the preference of the respective users. Of course, Yahoo!, AOL, and many others are also currently providing a similar service.
With the help of Google Alerts service, one can enter a complex topic to research upon or a simple search query and get them delivered via email through Google Alerts web service.
Furthermore, the search results can be filtered with the frequency decided by the user.
Note: Google Alerts service can be used with mail address of any domain but the highly recommended is to have a Gmail account to get uninterrupted updates.
Firefox Web Browser: It is not possible to do a research online without the help of a browser, not even the online tests can be done without the browser. There are many differences between the browsers. Every person has his/her best pick amongst the browsers, and one amongst the most powerful browsers is the Firefox.
Mozilla Firefox is the choice of the majority of online researchers, as it provides many useful tools for research such as opening of multiple tabs to the sinkable interface and to the add-ons based on XUL to the numerous plug-ins.
The latest addition of Mozilla Firefox literally offers everything that you may require to surf the internet.
Note: Firefox also provides Bugzilla for the developers, which is not available on any other browser.
Website Subscription: Blog lines News Feed Aggregator: Thousands and millions of websites covers the same data even though the research is being done for the online courses and distance education. The perfect task is to keep the track of all the relevant information.
However, though new and interesting information is always welcome, nobody feels like checking the data on a daily basis. The easiest way of keeping track of many websites is to subscribe to those sites. So, one gets the alerts all the time any recent news was added, a notification will be given. Such the result is being called as the Really Simple Syndication (RSS). One among the online publishing protocol and also a file format is Atom.
When subscribed to any feed of the website, the best way to track the updates is to keep an eye on headlines of new updates sent from the subscribed websites. One more way to get the updates is to subscribe to bloglines.
To do so, when the subscription page of the website is opened, click on the Subscribe button.
When it comes to internet marketing I think these are the basic tool that every site own should have and I think it is more effective to maximize the use of social media services as they have the visitors.
I have subscribed to Google Alerts for most of my website’s major keywords, site index keyword and related stuff and get instant updates. Very much useful tool for everyone.
I take the help of 2 things – Google reader for RSS subscriptions, and Alerts to set up the keyword alerts.