Awasu is an application (free, $29 and $79) which I learned about on the brilliant website Learning Tools Compendium.¹. More about Awasuin a moment, as I work backwards from how I found it to what problem I was/am trying to solve.

I was looking for a “feed reader,” a way to centralize the sites and writers I want to keep with. My primary blog, Popular Logistics, is in large part about disaster preparedness, so there are types of events where close-to-real-time coverage is critical. I’ve found Google Reader to effectively have only two settings – “trickle” and “fire hose,” and I haven’t figured out how to mark items “read” without marking several hundred “read” at once.

Here are some examples of the types of data streams I’m trying to keep track of – with a signal-to-noise ((the “signal-to-noise” ratio is a way of describing the mixture of information one has to review and discard (“noise”) to yield information that you wration that’s bearable.

• I’ve used Google Alerts with some success to keep track of one story, the disappearance in Iran of my dear friend, Robert Levinson. That google alert is pretty effective – but every third response seems to be about someone else named Bob or Robert Levinson. And sometimes important stories get to me as much as a week after publication, which probably just means that Google’s spiders, or “bots,” are always playing catch-up with the Internets.
• Some sites which have RSS feeds provide no apparent native control over what part of the feed you see – in other words, all or nothing. For instance, my local National Public Radio (NPR) affiliate, WNYC, provides free podcasts of almost all shows, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to just get notified of stories by Bob Hennelly, WNYC’s chief political reporter. Google Alerts has helped there, but doesn’t know about a story until after it’s been transcribed (usually one day or less), plus time for the Google bots to catch up.

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1. The Learning Tools Compendium is a project of Jane Hart, an educational consultant who has put a lot of thought and care into this terrific resource. Here’s a link to their 2010 Learning Tools Directory. She’s also responsible for Jane’s Learning Pick of the Day, 140 Learning, which “looks at how to use Twitter and Facebook for learning;” Social Media In Learning, and
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