If you’re into feed readers, then you probably rely on yours to bring you a great deal of the day’s news, whether business or personal.  If you do research on the Internet for any reason, as I do for writing, then your feed reader is likely a very busy place.  I use the Google Reader, but there are a great many great free readers out there.

Also, if you’re really using your news reader, or aggregator, you are always looking for new feed sources, or for new ways to serve them up.  One issue I have is a new interest in something, but all I have is some keywords or a key phrase.  Another is if I want to monitor a page that doesn’t have a feed.  Both of those are free and easy to handle if you know which tools to use.

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Google Alerts – For those cases where I have an interest in a topic, and I want to know when new information comes out on it, I use Google Alerts.  You can have them delivered to your email, but I prefer they come to my reader.  Just enter your keywords or phrases, and Google scours the web for the material.

Page2RSS – When I come across a site that doesn’t have an RSS feed, first I say some less-than-flattering things about it, then I go to Page2RSS.  It’s free, and I enter the URL of the page I want to monitor.  From then on, when that page is changed in some way, I get an alert in my reader.

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