41. Finding blogs that are right for your job

I may be going about things in a bit of a backwards way, but now that I've given you all tools to handle information overload and getting buried in blog information, I'll now give you some tools to go out and find those blogs that are right for your job - so that you can use the tools I've already given you to get yourself "unburied". The ReadWriteWeb blog (one of the blogs that I've identified as being necessary for my job) has posted about finding the right blogs for you in the past. In a fairly recent post, they compared six ways to find a blog that will help you keep on top of what you need to know to do your job. They followed that post up with a "why" and "how" post as well.
Why?

• Staying up-to-date on the news in your industry/area of work
• Knowing what people are talking about
• Finding reference resources for later use

How?
They, of course, reference their earlier post on the subject, the one I linked to above, and then gave some concrete examples of finding blogs for HR professionals, Physical Therapists and Fire Inspectors. You can take these same techniques and use them to find blogs that will help you keep up-to-date with what others in your job are doing, talking about and thinking about. You can also use alert services such as alerts.com to pull information about a particular keyword into your feed reader. Another tool that you can use is a custom search engine that does constant searches throughout the web for information you want and dumps the results into an RSS feed for your feed reader.

Using these tools, you should be able to find blogs that will pay off handsomely in your ability to stay on top of what is going on in your particular job. Just going through and doing an alert or custom search for keywords will really help you identify what blogs are discussing topics you care about.

38. Feedhub

Feedhub, a recommendation engine for RSS feeds, may be just what you need to start really taking control of your information sources. Are your feed reader "unread" items a bit higher than you like? Feedhub can analyze what you are reading now and pull interesting and relevant stories out of the 'net just for you. The more you use it, the better it gets at figuring out what it is you like. You can also point it toward your FriendFeed or Delicious accounts or your blog to teach it more about what you are interested in. Once Feedhub does the analyzing of your interests, you will start to get stories in your feed reader that are tailored for you. Once that happens, you can pretty much delete most of your other feeds and rely on Feedhub to keep you informed.
I haven't been using it for very long, but it seems to do a pretty good job of figuring out what sort of news/stories/blog posts I will like from my feeds and delivering them to me. I'll keep tweaking the stories it sends (by going to the Feedhub site and "voting" on the stories it suggests for me) to make it work even better, though! What I'd really like is for it to pull stories from *other* feeds to show me that match the kinds of stories I like, as well.
This tool is another possible way to take control of your information sources and manage your time efficiently - use it if you feel like you want more control over the amount of information that comes at your via your feed reader!

35. Time Management

One of the questions about the web I’m asked most often is - how do you find the time to keep up with everything? So I thought I'd share some tips and ask you for some tips. Here are mine:

• I don't try to keep up with everything. There is so much going on, I think it would be impossible to try to do it all and have a balanced life, so I accept that there will always be something I don’t know about.
• I have a great network of people; when I find something new I share, when they find something new they share
• I take what I like and throw the rest out. I’ll try most new services, set up an account, play with it for a while. If doesn’t click or do what I want, I stop using it.
• I don't use every tool everyday. Twitter is often overwhelming to me, and it interrupts me when I’m really focusing, so some days I don’t check in at all. I know I miss some good things, but it’s part of that “can’t do everything” acceptance.
• I’m organized - I use a feed reader and have over 10 folders. One titled daily - those are the blogs that have high priority, I don’t necessarily read them every day but if I have time they are the first ones that get read. This is a select folder and there are never more than 10 blogs in there. Other blogs are organized under subject. I try to read most of these once a week or so.
• I don’t try to do everything at once. First I got a Myspace page, mastered that (it took a while let me tell you and I cursed Myspace more than once) then I moved on to the next thing.
• I use gmail for my email list subscriptions, it groups emails together which makes is easy to follow conversations or delete the whole thread if I’m not interested. It also allows me to create custom labels (instead of folders) and sort incoming email by those and color code them!

Tools I use: a feed reader, blogs, email lists, FriendFeed, Facebook, Twitter, but use what works for you and you feel comfortable with.

What tips or tricks do you use for keeping up?

34 .Friendfeed Take 2 - the beta version

Bobbi mentioned the existence of a very cool lifestreaming application a while back called FriendFeed. Just last week, the fine folks behind this service released a "beta" (meaning not quite ready for everyone to use it) version of the new look/feel/features of the FriendFeed site and it is pretty amazing! You can now create lists and populate them with friends, work contacts, professional contacts or anything else you'd like and just view the feeds from the folks on a single list at one time. This is a great way to keep from being overwhelmed with information from your friends, collegues and co-workers all in the same "lifestream".
Also related to the friends lists, is a feature that wasn't advertised on the blog... It's called Fake Following. An excerpt from the TechCrunch post talking about the new feature says:

The Friend Lists also support “Fake Following” - a seemingly unintuitive feature that allows users to look like they’re following their friends without actually getting their updates. Users often expect to have their “Follows” reciprocated by their peers, and a failure to do so can lead to bruised egos. But indiscriminate following comes with a price too, as it ultimately leads to an unmanageable amount of noise (and stories you might not care about). Fake Following manages to skirt the issue with a digital white lie, and is a feature Twitter (which has a similar system) should offer too.

They have also improved the posting interface to allow easy posting of photos directly to FriendFeed. You can now post information about your life and include visual aids! They reworked the navigation to make FriendFeed rooms easier to find and manage - a nice touch to make getting around the site even easier. Finally (so far), they've also given us the ability to see another person's entire lifestream - their postings and all of their friends postings together - so that you can get a feel for what a particular person enjoys and/or finds interesting.
While the last option may seem to raise FriendFeed into the realm of a totally easy stalking tool, it also gives you a good bit of insight into your friends and allows you to find other friends very easily.
You can check out the new version by going to http://beta.friendfeed.com before it goes out, live, to all of the FriendFeed users. For those of you who decided not to join because it seemed too "noisy", you might want to take a second look - this new version is custom-made to make your FriendFeed experience as noisy or quiet as you want it to be!

25. Friend Feed

By now we've explored so many Web2.0 accounts, you and your friends have accounts on Twitter, Flickr, a blog, Facebook, YouTube and a lot more. So how do you keep up with all your friends accounts without spending half your day by going to all these sites to check in? FriendFeed!


Users sign up for an account from FriendFeed, add in the services they'd like to share then friends can create an account and subscribe to their feed. It's that easy! You can see when they upload pictures to Flickr, add a new book to LibraryThing, bookmark a new site on del.icio.us, start listening to a new station on Pandora or Lastfm and 30 other sites.

Check out MRRL's feed patrons who want to keep up with MRRL's happenings can do so in one place. You can even have the Feed digest sent to your email each day.

This can be a great time management tool. You can even great Imaginary Friends to follow the feeds of friends who haven't signed up for FriendFeed.

Like many sites there are some great privacy settings, your feed doesn't have to be public.

If you're interested My Feed.