Email alerts for beginners

Watching the BBC show, [spooks] CODE 9, this week; I thought it odd that some of the characters were using personal digital assistants (PDAs). The series is set in 2012 and given the declining sales of PDAs; I suspect the humble PDA will be largely obsolete by then - even if London is destroyed by an act of nuclear terrorism.

The declining sales of PDAs is largely down to the popularity of other portable tech- namely smart phones like the Blackberry and now Apple’s iPhone. Using smartphones, people can communicate in a whole set of new ways via text message, picture message, videocalls and instant messaging, as well as through social networking - using mobile internet or by email. The PDA or pocket PCs as some became known have fallen by the way side as people are unwilling to carry several electronic devices where one will do the trick.

Apple’s decision to combine mobile phone and ipod in the glorious iPhone saw this trend coming as many modern phones have perfectly acceptable mp3 players and indeed cameras. Now that we have high speed mobile broadband these devices are genuinely making the internet mobile and look likely to kill of stand alone mp3 players as well as the PDA.

If you are one of the increasing army of people using email on your phone it is well worth looking taking advantage of email alerts to keep you up to date with the latest information on the web. Whilst some news sites such as the news.bbc.co.uk allow you to set up alerts based on your interests, many smaller sites do not offer an email alerting service. There is a way round this problem - a free web service called sendmeRSS allows you to set up alerts from any site that has an RSS feed.

RSS feeds as discussed in a previous entry allow you to be constantly updated on new stories. If for example you want to be updated by email when a new skinflakes blog is produced simply follow theses instructions:

How to create email alerts from RSS feeds

1. identify an RSS feed that is of interest eg http://feeds.feedburner.com/skinflakes
2. go to http://www.sendmerss.com
3. type in the address of the rss feed of interest
4. type in you email adress.
5. go to your email and verify you address by clicking on the appropriate link
6. every morning you will see new emails generated from an RSS feed

Another way of creating email alerts is to use the google alerts service which allows you to recieve daily emails based on searches in google news. This can be a very useful way of media monitoring for small companies that can't justify the expense of media monitoring.