This columnist is a newshound. Apart from having to keep up to date with science and technology news, and interesting stuff from national and international politics, business and sports, he also feels it’s important to find new sources of news, too. This is called content discovery, and your existing news app won’t help with this because it shows you the news, not other places to find it.
There is a hoard of apps to get over this barrier. Better yet, if you’re a Google Chrome user, there are loads of extensions, too. Here are three. All are free.
Zemanta
If you’re a blogger, Zemanta is mandatory. Every time you hammer out a post, just click save and then wait for Zemanta to do its magic. It parses through your post, picking up keywords, and then searching the web for news, popular blogs, tweets and images associated with those keywords.
You include all this information in the post you are writing or, at the click of one button, have Zemanta automatically suggest words that can be hyperlinked to internal and external content. This is very resourceful because interlinking improves your blog’s PageRank.
Beyond content discovery, Zemanta also recommends tags for you to append with your post, increasing its ‘findability’ on the web.
Spling
Spling makes content discovery social. Install the extension first; now, every time you find something interesting bobbing around on the web, click on the extension and it will share the news item with friends, family, your Facebook feed, or some other community.
While this doesn’t facilitate content discovery directly, it helps build a community through which you can discover new sources information.
The extension also saves the article you just shared in a list. As you share more, the list also accumulates into a repository, where you can see at first glance what you’ve shared, with whom, and in which one of various categories. Spling itself comes with recognising such fields as fashion, music, news, sports, etc.
Pin Search
With Pin Search, you can pin the web on your browser.
Say you’re surfing Pinterest and find an image that catches your eye. You just right-click on it, save it to your desktop, and move on. But what if where you picked the image up from is not where other images like it are situated? You install Pin Search and click on the ‘Search’ button that’ll now appear when you hover over the image. This time, the extension will leverage Google Search to find you the picture’s creator/owner, all the websites on which the picture appears, the different contexts in which it’s used and, based on that, all the other images like it. Such a feature is bound to be useful when you’re researching something.
Extras
You can try Tumby for finding great stuff on Tumblr and The Key for finding great stuff on YouTube. Happy exploring.
