David asked:
Can we have a section of our blog where we can post links to stories on popular green sites?

Answer

There are several ways we can do this, but we’re going to cover just two, the “blindingly simple”, the “slightly more interesting”, and the “link blogging” approach.

The blindingly simple (RSS) approach

RSS feeds (standing for “Really Simple Syndication”) are a feature of nearly all blogs and most news sites these days.
What this means is that sites publish a feed of headlines, content and links.
This feed can be included in lots of other places. One of these places could be your blog: it’s straightforward to include a feed in (say) the right-hand column of your site.

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Remember books? Remember how you used to put bookmarks in them so you knew exactly where you were up to and didn’t have to search through them to find your page?

Online, you might use bookmarks already like this: you find something you like on the web, so you bookmark it. From then on, if you want to return to that page, you don’t have to search for it – you just go straight to that bookmark (sometimes called a ‘Favorite’ for example on Internet Explorer).

Now consider what you do when you give people documents or reports that you’ve read. To bring certain areas to their attention you might put notes in the margins, or a list of interesting pages at the front. You might put post-its in the report explaining why this is interesting.

This is what social bookmarking is, using the web, with all its interconnectivity, to share many bookmarks for many documents between many people.

Social bookmarking takes the approach that, if you share your bookmarks online, other people can see what you consider interesting, and you can find out what other people have bookmarked. To make it easier to share bookmarks, you can also tag them and add notes.

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News. There’s a lot of it around, especially online. You can monitor some of this perhaps, but how do you even begin to get a feel for what people are saying in the blogosphere, or on the forums?

And what about pictures?

And what about audio and video?

Netvibes lets you put together your own web page from small ‘web windows’ called widgets. Together, they give you a great overview of the news landscape for a given topic. You can pick and choose what you want to see, and customise each widget to show more or less information.

This is good, but when you share your news tracker, it’s great. Many eyes make light work, so set your team up with a Netvibes account and take it in turns to monitor news, or allocate members to certain types of coverage. If someone improves a widget then this benefits the entire team, immediately.

Share more. If you’re monitoring on behalf of clients, why not let them in on the act? That they’re seeing online information about themselves and their competitors is only half the story: the other half is that you’ve impressed them with your technical know-how.

Share more. You can keep all this private – but why not go public? If you think you’re good enough, then why not show everyone what you’re monitoring, and for whom? Sure, it takes courage to share. But in a world of wikinomics, the returns can be enormous.

How long will this take me?

At first this may take an hour or so, simply because you’re getting the hang of it. After that you should be able to put together a decent tracker in half an hour, especially as you start to adapt trackers you’ve already created.

What do I need to know first?

You need to have identified the keywords you’ll be searching on, and to have built up search queries from them. It would also benefit you to know a bit about Really Simple Syndication (RSS).

You also need a Netvibes account. It’s quick and painless to sign up.

And, just to cover all the bases here, you need to have a clear idea of the kind of news you want to cover, and why. You’re going to get quite a few choices, so be clear on what you’re trying to achieve.

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