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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RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is used in most blogs.  Every time a post is published, an RSS feed announcement goes out to the Web.  For those who have subscribed to a particular site’s RSS feed, they will get that post, or an excerpt of it, delivered automatically to their “feed reader.”  So, by subscribing to the sites that publish content you want to read, you get all of those figurative “newspapers” delivered to your doorstep as they are published.

Some of the very best feed readers are absolutely free, and I use the Google Reader, which is free as well.  Here is a link to a Google search on free readers so you can check them out.

[important]There’s a video on RSS feed subscription in the Premium Content below the Related Artciles.[/important]

Related Articles:

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I have used “Starring” for a while to store away and easily access articles for my writing research.  However, then I must call up the starred items and go through them.  By using “tagging,” you can greatly enhance your ability to locate previous articles.  Using a combination of starring and tagging, you can group your content for efficient retrieval later.

[important]There’s a short video showing how to do this step-by-step in the Premium Content below.[/important]{+++}
Premium Content

I use “Starring” and “Tagging” in Google Reader to file away huge amounts of research and material that comes in every day via RSS feeds from my blog subscriptions.  As I write for clients, and topics vary from real estate to technology, I get a lot of posts, and need to be able to read them in detail when I have time.

I also like to mark those that I might want to write about for this blog.  As there are several hundred posts that I’ve scanned the title and excerpt, but haven’t had time to read yet, I need a way to store them for easy location later.  Here’s what I do:

• I tag the interesting posts with the appropriate subject tag to get it into a folder for that topic.  In the case of articles related to technology, I tag them “tech.”
• I star those posts that look like they may be something I’d also like to write about here, or comment on them and link back.

This way, when I have the time to read, I can pull up all the items tagged as “tech” and read those I select.  If they have a star, then I also decide if I do still want to write about them.  If so, the star stays, like a to-do tag, until the post is written.  If not, I remove the star.  Here’s a video on this system: