Marshall Kirkpatrick says it best on his post Screen Shots: How I Use RSS to Track Thousands of News Sources Easily
“The most common topic I give training presentations on is the use of RSS for tracking issues important to various organizations. This has been the heart of what I’ve focused on since I first got involved in this industry, that hasn’t changed. My methodology has changed a lot over the years. It’s a happy day when I can add something new to my personal RSS strategy, and thus to the strategy I share with others.”
With that said make sure you read over his post, specifically noting the tools he uses. Next step is to use tools like Delicious and others to find blogs you are interested in and subscribe to their RSS feed using the tools mentioned above to organize, sort, read, etc…
- Live Presentation Today: RSS for Business – Excellent video aimed primarily at businesses, lots of useful information on everything RSS.
- Comparing Six Ways to Identify Top Blogs in Any Niche – Post talks about pros/cons of using different sites/tools to look for the top blogs based on any keyword
- How to Find the Weirdest Stuff on the Internet – This methodology helps you systematically discover the top blogs in any niche and get a feed of just the most popular items published by those top blogs.
- How to: Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet for Any Topic -This is the post you want to pay extra attention to as it walks you through how to identify top blogs on any topic, quickly figure out what their most popular recent posts have been about, and how to find where else they are participating in conversations around the web.
- How to: Start Using Greasemonkey in Under 5 Minutes – Specifically you want to take away how to install Greasemonkey for Firefox.
- Five Great Delicious Hacks, in Five Minutes, for Delicious’s 5th Birthday – This post features a video of the best ways to use the Firefox plug-in Greasemonkey to radically change the Delicious experience. This is really easy to do, as you’ll see, and all the links are included below the video. Make sure to install the script that will sort Delicious links based on popularity.
- If the page does not have an RSS feed do not worry, you can screen scrape to create an RSS feed!
The key take away is that RSS is like tivo for the internet, with RSS the content you want is easily available when and where you want it. Having a good set of RSS feeds for a topic/community is the first step to actually engaging with the people in that online community, that step is being able to listen!
[...] RSS and beyond: What is it? How can You Use it? Hint: Listen Jul 03 [...]