yolink Is Like Steroids For Web Research

Last week I wrote about a search engine called Sweet Search, which limited your results to certain preselected sites (meh), and would automatically export preselected blocks of relevant text to a Google Doc (awesome).  Needless to say, I promptly received an email informing me that the awesome exporting features are actually supplied by a company called yolink. My bad.

Anyway, I checked out yolink's site, and have to say I'm pretty impressed.  In addition to selling their services to sites like Sweet Search, they also offer a free Chrome, Firefox, and IE browser extension, which I test out in the video below:

Who Would We Cast in the HackCollege Movie?

Episode 7: The HackCollege team talks about our favorite posts of the week, the incredibly-inspiring The Social Network, and formulate plans for the 100 million dollar HackCollege movie. If your browser doesn't support the HTML5 player below, just download the .mp3 here.

Show Notes

• Make Life Easier: Ask a Librarian
• Master the Art of the Slow Cooker
• Use Sweet Search to Research on the Fly
• Trailer: The College Blog

Want us to talk about something on the next episode? Let us know in the comments!

New LinkedIn Feature Help Students Build Career Paths

LinkedIn: Now available in felt. Photo courtesy of coletivomambembe. Licensed under CC BY-2.0.

As hopefully all of you know, LinkedIn is a professional networking website that allows those looking for jobs, especially college students, to create profiles and look for business and career opportunities. It's a really fantastic service, and if you haven't signed up yet, you definitely should. LinkedIn caters to 80 million users worldwide and is an easy-to-use tool that may help you find a job or career after college.

To add to its professional networking services, LinkedIn recently added a new feature to its site called Career Explorer. The new feature will allow college students to essentially map out their desired career path and visualize how they can attain this path. Students are able to look at career paths that those before them have taken in order to understand what steps they must take to get to their goals.

On LinkedIn's press page, the chief executive officer of LinkedIn Jeff Weiner said,"LinkedIn is about connecting talent with opportunity at massive scale. Career Explorer is the latest example of how we make that possible by providing one of our fastest growing demographics, students and recent college graduates, unique and valuable insights enabling them to develop the optimal career path. We're excited to be launching this product in partnership with PwC, one of the largest and most forward thinking recruiters of new graduates."

Other features that LinkedIn Career Explorer offers include:

• Connections - allows students to seek out those in their field of interest as possible sources of information or career opportunities
• Statistics - gives users stats about different careers
• Jobs - alert students to possible job openings and possible networking opportunities to help them attain those openings
• Follow Potential Employers - acts kind of like a Twitter feed for LinkedIn businesses as it sends students information and updates about businesses that you follow

Currently Career Explorer is being offered to a select 60 universities (which are not all listed) across the country. However, on-campus demonstrations and events promoting LinkedIn and Career Explorer have begun at several larger universities. If you attend New York University, Boston College, Brigham Young University, the Ohio State University, the Pennsylvania State University, Syracuse University, the University of Florida, the University of Illinois, the University of Maryland, the University of Southern California or the University of Washington, look for LinkedIn events happening on your campus. These universities are obviously part of the 60 universities to which LinkedIn has limitedly released Career Explorer, but gradually, the service of Career Explorer will be offered to more and more universities. For more information, head to the press page regarding Career Explorer.

[LinkedIn Career Explorer via TechCrunch]

What do you think of the idea of Career Explorer? How useful do you think it would be to college students? Are you eager for the release of the service to your university? To those who have access to the service, what do you think of it?

WebGreek Provides Information Management for Greek Life

These ladies know that better information management gives you more time to perfect your grim staring and Gibson Girl hairstyle. Image courtesy of Albion College Special Collections. Licensed under CC 2.0 BY-NC-ND.

As we saw in Sean’s post, sometimes communicating with your Greek organization can present its own unique set of challenges. WebGreek is attempting to address them by making an information management suite targeted at Greek organizations.

The service isn’t free--$19/month for under 40 members, $39/month for under 100 members, and $59/month for everyone else--but they seem to be banking on the fact that Greek organizations will pay for ease of use.

Once a group signs up, it gets a chapter page on which users can see a group calendar, links to nationals, uploaded files, or whatever users have added to the public space. WebGreek has a built-in text editor and list maker, as well as plans to add a bill collection feature soon. Each chapter gets 10GB of cloud storage and 20GB of bandwith. Each individual member gets 1GB of storage to do with what they please.

Click to read more ...

The College Blog Trailer

Thanks to Kelly for putting this amazing video together.