The bitter old guard say this is the very thing that is destroying journalism and that real ‘in the field’ reporting is now dead and gone.

I don’t know about that, but I know that my work colleagues and I do 95% of our interviews over the phone and the majority of our research begins and ends with Google.

I don’t have the time or the word count to debate whether this is good or bad journalism, but I know it makes my job a hell of a lot easier and for this I am grateful.

But the internet has already progressed far beyond Google and we now have even more sophisticated tools at our disposal.

Here are some of them in easy to read point form. Click on each for a more detailed explanation than I have the room for:

* RSS or ‘Really Simple Syndication’ – Trawls the net for your favourite content and feeds it to your hungry RSS reader.
* Technorati – The Google of the blog world. Here’s an edublogger post with a good overview of Technorati.
* Moblogs – Not hip hop slang for more blogs, but actually geek slang for mobile phone blogs.
* Podcasts – Do I really need to explain?
* Vlogs – A blog… on video
* Twitter – What are you doing?
* Del.icio.us – The humble bookmark has evolved.

Just for fun, here is a twit’s guide to Twitter: