January 21, 2009, Vol. 3, Issue 1

RSS Feeds. They can be amazingly useful and help to streamline your information intake. But more and more, we talk to people who just can’t wrangle them. The feeds, in their wild unruliness, are almost as useful as having no feeds at all.

But don’t despair! We have some ideas to help you use RSS feeds to your advantage. And advantage is good, right?

Can’t get in the habit of checking the feed reader?

Happens to the best of us. Here’s a solution. RSSFWD. Simply enter the site you want to monitor and you’ll get an email when there’s a new item. No need to register. No muss. No fuss.

You’d follow some feeds if you could find them.

Sure you know the sites you already frequent and can find their feeds. But what if you want to find feeds in the industry or subject that you’re jamming on? Try RSSMicro. It’s a dedicated RSS Feed Search Engine that currently searches 5.7 million RSS feeds. 5.7 million? That’s a lot! Oh, and you can search by posts, feeds, or news. We love it.

Tired of Google Alerts?

Now, we are not saying there is no place for email alerts. We did just tell you how to get more, if you want. So if you’re loving a full email box, stick with your alerts. They work nicely.

But if you want to use your RSS reader (and if you can make it a habit, we strongly suggest it), you are going to love, love, love this site – Feed Your Search. Just run a Google search from the page (choose news, general, blogs, and more) and then it creates the search feed and even lets you subscribe right from the page. It’s clean and nice and fast… we just can’t say enough good things.

So many ideas. So little time.

We have so many more great ideas but know that you have work to do. Thanks for taking the time to read and we’ll share more in 2 weeks. Or write to us if you can’t wait that long!