My Favourite Tipples from a Telecoms, Media and Technology Information Officer
Jinfo Blog

By Scott Vine

Abstract

My Favourite Tipples are shared by Scott Vine, senior Telecoms, Media and Technology (TMT) knowledge and information officer for Clifford Chance LLP. He shares his favourite online resources for note taking, current awareness monitoring, online education and ebooks.

Item

I must confess when I was asked to do this it was tempting to just have one link, a link to Twitter. I was an early adopter of Twitter and it is still somewhere where I extract a lot of value, both personally and for work purposes. But, that would make this the shortest Tipples ever, and those who know me would attest that wouldn't be like me at all. So...

• Evernote: I log on to the website, access via the apps on my phone or tablet or email stuff directly from my PC/Mac to this site every day. Whether it's badly sung ideas for a song, notes for an article or podcast, ideas for birthday or Christmas presents, recipes, how-to lists, quotes or sections from websites, shopping lists, scanned documents and contacts cards, starred emails from Gmail, they're all saved here. It's my one-stop-shop app of choice. I also use it to draft shorter pieces of writing that I do and for planning out adhoc slides for talks. I use it so much I have been paying for the Premium version for three years.

• Feedly: RSS is one of those words you don't seem to be allowed to say out loud anymore, but I still think it's a hugely important technology and it is still vital in minimising the amount of time I "waste" on work and personal related current awareness. To that end, Feedly is one of the few options still available, following the sad demise of Google Reader, for those of us who still need a means to rattle through updates from hundreds of websites in a short period of time.

• NetGalley: I became aware of this site around 18 months ago when I was approached by an literary agent to review a book. It's a site where publishers can make available digital "galley" copies of upcoming books to allow people to read and review them. It's free to sign up and create a profile, then all you do is start requesting books. The publisher looks at your profile and says yay or nay based on that. Publishers can also chose to "pre-approve" you, meaning they open up all their titles to you without the need to be approved on a title by title basis. 

• Udemy: I have been driven recently by the desire to refresh some of my IT skills, and this site has provided a means to accomplish this. Udemy is an online education marketplace. There are courses on just about every topic imaginable whether it be better Yoga techniques, coding in PHP, introductions to topics such as accounting or marketing, or learning a language/musical instrument.  All the courses are web-based and every course is available on-demand, so students can learn at their own pace, on their own time, and on any device. The site also regularly has "sales" where course prices are dropped substantially for short periods.

An article in FreePint I found particularly interesting:

• As someone who has recently taken editorial and management responsibility for Clifford Chance's client facing online Energy Alerter service, Mirjam Wolfrum's  "Insider Knowledge - Researching Oil & Gas" was a timely read. I always find high level overviews of subjects an extremely useful starting point to familiarising myself with a new subject area, and this served that purpose perfectly.

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