Introduction to Personal Streams

andPersonal News Pages

Introduction

• Your Personal Stream is a feed of news articles that matter to you, and which you define using various tools. It has its own web page and you can make it public or private.

• Your Personal News Page includes the latest articles from your Personal Stream plus articles from your choice of Eqentia portals and connections. The portals could be created by you, or by other Eqentia users who have chosen to make them freely available. Personal News Pages are private.

Account setup• You are welcome to browse through our public

portals, but you won’t fully experience the amazing power of Eqentia until you set up a personal account.

• It’s free.

• It’s easy.

• Start by clicking on the Signup link at the top rightof your screen.

If you have a Twitter account, you can use it to register.

Or you can create an Eqentia account.

You’ll receive an email from us with a link to complete your registration. Just click on the link and you’ll be automatically logged in to your Personal Stream.

Personal Streamportal.eqentia.com/u/username

• Your Personal Stream is a feed of news articles that matter to you, and which you define using various tools. It is created automatically when you set up an Eqentia account.

• Some tools are used to add articles one-by-one, while others work automatically (employing filters)

• You can view your Personal Stream on its own web page, which can be public or private

• Your Personal Stream can also appear on your Personal News Page, along with articles from your favorite Eqentia portals and connections.

Should your Personal Stream bepublic or private?Private: Great for personal development, competitive

intelligence, saving articles to read later, or curating articles for publishing into a public portal.

Public: Great for promoting and sharing what you're reading, collecting and favoring. Simply give friends and colleagues the address of your personal stream, post it on your blog, or add the Personal Stream widget to your blog or website.When your friends visit your Personal Stream, they can ‘follow’ it (it will appear in their Personal News Page) or grab the widget to install on their site.

Making your Personal Stream public or private

• Click on your username at the top right of any Eqentia page

• Click on ‘Edit Account Settings’

• Under ‘Publishing Settings’ choose Public or Private• Click on ‘Save Changes’ at top right of page• You can change between private/public at any time

Add articles to your Personal Streamone-by-one, using these methods:

1. Search the Eqentia news database

2. Grab interesting articles as you discover them, using the MarkIt bookmarklet

3. Email article URLs to your Personal Stream

4. Using Twitter, “favorite” a tweet

5. Using Google Reader, “star” an article or “share it on Facebook”

1. Search the Eqentia news database

If you pause before hitting the Enter key, Eqentia will propose various search options, and show existing connections and portals related to your query.

• clicking on “Curate”

• choosing “Republish” and “Personal Stream”

From the search results page, you can add any article to your Personal Stream by

2. Grab interesting articles, as you discover them, using MarkIt

• First, you need to install the MarkIt bookmarklet on your web browser toolbar.

• To get the bookmarklet, go to the Bookmarklets page (the link is in the footer section at the bottom of every page).

• Drag the MarkIt button to your browser toolbar.

• When you are viewing a web page that you’d like to add to your Personal Stream, simply click the MarkIt button.

• You can add the article to any stream for which you have administrator privileges.

3. Email articles to your Personal Stream

• To enable this feature, go to the Edit Account Settings page and click on the tab marked My Personal Stream

• Click on “Create Secret Address”

• Save the secret email address in your email software’s address book. (Tip: Name it “Send to Eqentia” or something similar.)

• To complete the setup, click on Change and choose the streams in which you would like emailed articles to appear.

• Note that you can specify additional stream(s) whenever you email an article by simply including the stream name(s) within the body of your email message.

4. Sync with your Twitter Favorites

If you logged in to Eqentia using your Twitter ID, you will automatically see Tweets that you ‘favorite’ in your Personal Stream.

If you did not log in using Twitter, you can connect to Twitter now by clicking on“Edit Account Settings” in the Personal Menu at top right...

...then click on the tab marked My Personal Stream, and tick the box beside Sync Twitter Favorites.

5. Sync with Google Reader

Your Personal Stream can automatically import any of your Google Reader content that you have “starred” (see illustration) and/or “shared on Facebook”.

To enable this, go to the Edit Account Settings page, click on the tab marked My Personal Stream, and click on the Connect to Google Reader link.

Add articles to your Personal Stream automatically, using these methods:

1. Use the Edit Account Settings page to test and manage filters

2. Create filters as you browse, using the InstAlert bookmarklet

1. Test and manage filters

• Go to the Edit Account Settings page, click on the tab marked My Personal Stream, and create your own custom filter

• Test your new filter

• If you’re satisfied with the results, add it to your Personal Stream, or edit it and try again

• Keep your filter tight, because there is a limit of 30 articles per day on Personal Streams

• You can add up to 5 filters

• Edit or delete filters by clicking on the filter

• Filters will stop working after 30 days, at which time you may recreate them

2. Create filters using InstAlert

• Go to the Bookmarklets page (the link is at the bottom of every page) and drag the InstAlert button to your browser toolbar.

• While viewing any web page, highlight text from the page that you wish to include in your filter.

• Click on the InstAlert button.• If you are satisfied with the results, click Add

Filter.• Or, edit the filter and test again.

Removing articles from your Personal Stream

• Click the ‘Curate’ link below the article

• Choose ‘Remove Article’

Daily email settings

• Your Personal Stream will automatically send you articles every morning (Mon-Sat) via email

• Do disable this feature, or to adjust the content of your emails, go to the ‘Edit Account Settings’ page and click on ‘Change’ in the Email section

Ways to share your Personal Stream

1. Make your Personal Stream public so others can follow it. Go to ‘Edit Account Settings’ and select Public under Publishing Options.

Then give people the address of your Personal Stream page, or post links to it on your blog or social media accounts.

People who visit the page will be able to ‘follow’ your Personal Stream on their Eqentia Personal News Page.

2. Create a widget of your Personal Stream

• Click the widget buttonnear the top right of yourPersonal Stream page.

• Follow the instructions to create the perfect size widget to fit your blog or website.

• Let your friends know that they can create their own widget of your Personal Stream.

A Personal Stream widget

3. Direct others to your Personal Stream RSS

• Click the RSS button nearthe top right of yourPersonal Stream page

• Copy the RSS feed URL from the browser address bar to your feed reader or other application (e.g. a blog widget) or share the address with friends and colleagues. (They can view it in any web browser.)

• Feed the RSS into your blog (e.g. using a WordPress widget.

4. Share a link to your Personal Stream

• Why not send a message to let your friends know about your Personal Stream?

• Click the “Share” button at top right of your Personal Stream page.

• Then choose to sendthe link via Twitter,Facebook, Email or Google Buzz.

5. Tweet your entire Personal Stream*

• Eqentia can automatically tweet a link to each article that appears in your Personal Stream, or to articles on certain topics only.

• Tweets are sent as soon as we fetch each article.

• Tweets can be sent from your existing Twitter account, or you can create a new Twitter account for them.

* This is a premium account feature. Contact us for details.

6. Share individual articles from your Personal Stream via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or email.

Personal News Pageportal.eqentia.com

This is where you’ll see articles from your choice of portals, connections and your Personal Stream.

If you are not registered, you’ll see articles from a variety of sample portals.

How to find your Personal News Page

• Click the link in the top bar of any page

• Then click on “take me to my personal news page”

To find existing portals, click on Explore Channels & Personalize at the top of your screen.

Here are just a few of the portals currently available:

Add content to your Personal News Page

• Click on the +Follow button beside a portal name to add it to your Personal News Page

• You can also visit portals and, if you decide to follow them, click the +Follow button in the portal

Follow a Connection

If you don’t wish to follow an entire portal but, rather, only one or more connections from that portal:

• Go to the portal (“Commodities” in the example above)

• Refine the portal to the desired connection (“Gold” in the example)

• Click the “Follow this connection” button...

...or, while still on the Explore Channels page, click ‘Follow connections’ below any portal name...

...and click on the connections you wish to follow (gold and tin in this example)

Rearrange your Personal News Page

• On your Personal News Page,click on “Reorganize Channels”at the top right.

• Click and drag the portal names into any sequence you wish.

• You can hide any portal by clicking the unmarked button to the right of the portal name.

• When finished, click on “Save Changes”

Thanks for watching!

For addition information or assistance, please contact us at support@eqentia.com

Copyright 2011 Eqentia Inc.