This was the 2008 edition of a reading list handed out in a session on online tools in the iJournalism class at the UBC School of Journalism. What was striking about it, compared with the previous year’s version, was the turnover: some tools had fallen away and new categories had appeared, including sites that mine social networks for personal information.
The list was organised by task. Desktop feed reading meant NetNewsWire or NewsFire on the Mac and FeedDemon or FeedReader on Windows; online, Google Reader and Bloglines. Personalised news pages covered MyYahoo, iGoogle, Netvibes and PageFlakes. Blog aggregation ran through Technorati, Icerocket and BlogPulse; micro-blogging through Twitter, Twitter Search and Tweet Scan; alerts through Google and Yahoo. The Web 2.0 section grouped documents (Google Docs, Zoho), photos (Flickr), social bookmarking (Delicious), organisation (Backpack), bypassing registration walls (Bugmenot) and free online storage (Windows Live SkyDrive, Box, Wuala). Last came people search: Pipl, Wink, ZoomInfo and YoName.
It was offered as an introduction rather than an exhaustive inventory.