More and more people switch from the traditional news sources (newspaper/radio/tv) to websites, blogs and tweets. As they usually subscribe to the given feeds of their interest, there is less clutter, advertisement or irrelevant information in the newsflow. But we still get useless information or double entries to the same subject. So how can we handle all those flows efficiently and don’t miss a beat? Here’s my solution:
- I manage all my feeds with google reader. Be it at home or in the office, I can always access the feeds. For the ones that don’t like online tools, there are desktop applications (as eventbox for mac) that can be synchronized with the account. The key is: It doesn’t matter how you access your feeds as long as you manage them online you can read them everywhere.
- Organize your feeds in different sections according to your interests (I have some for each client I do media monitoring, one for all Apple news, a more fun one…).
- Install a RSS-reader app on your smartphone and link it to your google reader account.
OK, now you are ready for the process. How’s that going?
- In the first step, you do the triage. I normally do that on my mobile device when I have some time waiting for the bus, in the train or on the toilet. I then flip through the posts looking for interesting stuff that I have to look closer.
- Once you find a post worth reading in full, downloading an file/image, watching a flash movie or just not being sure what to think about, I mark this post as “favourite”.
- When I have time or between two tasks I log in to google reader and look at all the accumulated posts in the section with the star.
- Once I finished with the post, I uncheck it, so it won’t appear the next time.
- If I really like the post, I recommend it, add an “I like” tag, tag it or tweet the site.
Remember: You can also get feeds with search results from google news or twitter…
Option Twitter
You can do the same with your twitter feeds (if you have not too many of them).
- Go to your twitter account(s) and get the RSS feed for your ‘favourites‘.
- Import that feed into google reader.
- Organize those feeds in a separate folder (you don’t want to look at those twice).
- Start the triage in your smartphone twitter app and mark the important ones as “favourite”.
- Check out the accumulated tweets in the twitter-folder
How do YOU manage your feeds? Tell me about your best practice…