Finding your Inner Tech Diva

OK. Us middle aged women aren’t exactly known as tech divas. There are digital immigrants, and there are digital natives. As you might guess, immigrants may learn a language and culture well enough to get along but, most likely, they will never be as comfortable with it as the natives.

Think: you vs. your teenager, and your respective relationships to ipods, texting, twittering, Facebook, etc. Now, wild guess as to which one of you is the digital native?? :)

Nevertheless, the human resources and staffing folks insist that it’s very important we get on board with this tech stuff in order to stay relevant in the workplace as we get older. We will, after all, be managing or be managed by digital natives. We need to understand their world even if we don’t entirely embrace it.

So, in that spirit, a priority of WomenBloom is to help us all get up to speed on what’s happening in the tech world.

Today, Gentle Bloomers, we are going to talk about something called ‘Readers’ and tell you how they can help you.

Do you have news sites, or certain blogs you enjoy reading? Maybe you’re signed up for email notifications for new information from those sites. Or, maybe you don’t do either because the thought of opening the floodgates of information from the web makes you tired.

Well, Readers are like an email inbox that sits on the web and receives the latest information from your favorite news, blogs and other sites. Once it’s set up, you simply go to your Reader as often as you care to and see what’s new on your favorites. If you use Google Reader, which is tres simple, you simply would go to Google's home page, and click Reader to see the latest.

You can either read the latest article or blog post in the Reader itself, but you have the option of clicking through to the actual website or blog if you want to.

Benefits:

• No more going to each site individually to check whether something new is going on.
• If you’ve been going the email notification route, Readers mean fewer emails clogging your inbox.
• You can process more information from the web easier because it’s all in one place.
• You control the ‘when’ of checking for new information

Here is a great Readers for Dummies video that explains in plain English what readers are and how to set one up for yourself. It’s easy, really. If I can figure it out, any of you can.

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