Information is a powerful thing. It is also addictive. For me, it is work. Here are my best tips on how I keep myself up to date to write articles to Maxping, usually before mainstream news can react.
There are some things in staying on top of news that are harder
to gain, and then there are some really easy ones. I will start
with the hard way. To successfully stay on top of things you need
both. The easy ones are a good way to start if you are a virtual
worlds enthusiast, user, blogger, analyst or a
journalist.
The hard way
You need to know the key people from the projects you want to
follow. This is sometimes the hard thing to achieve, you need to go
to conferences and meetings and have face to face meetings with
them. Even as we live the dawn of virtual meetings, nothing beats
the personal face to face meeting. In Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash
novel the quality of the simulation was so good that it enabled
business meetings, when we hit the same level eventually, then we
can do it without expensive travel.
I am mainly following Opensim and realXtend projects, so I
periodically talk with people from those projects. In addition to
those some other companies, grids and institutes, also individual
people who are working in the area. Some people use Skype, some use
google chat, others want to use email, or meet in-world. The best
news I get this way - the information is out there, but in many
cases it is not told anywhere (read: Internet) at all.
The little bit easier way
The next best thing to personal connections are the mailing
lists. Usually things pop up there first, but they are hidden
inside a technical babble, so it may be hard to decipher for the
uninitiated. Also the amount of daily emails may be quite a
problem. The opensim and realxtend users' mailing lists can be
viewed in a handy Nabble format using these links:
http://n2.nabble.com/opensim-users-f2152040ef2152040.html
http://n2.nabble.com/realXtend-mailing-list-f2348077ef2348077.html
The easy way
Google
alerts lets you set up a daily automatic search for new items
matching your search words. I use realXtend, Maxping, and Opensim
as my search words and I really get all the blog items, news items
and web pages where the search terms appears daily on my mail
box.
What I have found the easiest of all, and where I have found
many great stories for Maxping, is Twitter. There are many great guys and gals
doing good job reporting on news. Here is my recommended list of
Twitterers to follow:
Maxping announces all the fresh news items at Twitter: maxpingmagazine
Naturally you can get a lot of first hand news items from me: snowcrashme and from RalfHaifisch.
The maybe most comprehensive source is Consiliera, she tweets news from many sources
and also relays (retweets) other important notes from other Twitter
users.
Dr
Manhattan is the CEO of Reactiongrid, and he announces many
important things at Twitter only, he is also retweeting many
interesting bits and pieces.
Other good sources are BevanWhitfield, JeffLowe, malburns, MariaKorolov, doeko, ...
and I'm sure I am forgetting someone here - please add a comment to
this article with your twitter name!
If you are new to twitter, you need to create an account, then
visit those links above and press the "follow" button.
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