There’s been much discussion lately around ways to follow and keep up with friends and the latest news in the tech world. There are plenty of new startups looking to make life easier; many have merit, but here’s a few tips to help you know what’s going on.
A Good FeedReader
Many consider that understanding and subscribing to feeds is a given, but the reality is that terms like RSS, Atom, and even Feeds are foreign to most people. The starting point is always a good feedreader. My personal choice is Google Reader, but I was a Bloglines fan for many years and they’ve been implementing a lot of extra features, so ultimately pick between the two. Once you’ve picked a FeedReader you should naturally subscribe to TechCrunch here. One source is never enough, so subscribe to ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm and VentureBeat as well.
A Start Page
After TechCrunch naturally, I start my mornings on TechMeme. Gabe Rivera’s site is a favorite and despite some criticism elsewhere continues to accurately track the big stories in the tech blogosphere, and that includes general tech away from the stuff we cover on TechCrunch.
Twitter
Twitter I’m told is still an acquired taste, but I’m finding more and more that I pick up breaking stories first on Twitter. Twitter is only as good as the network you link in to; so it can be a bit hard (or barren) at first. The key is to give it time, and add friends.
Overall
If you want a full picture of our industry and space there are existing tools that allow you to do it well, complete with interaction. There’s a lot of noise out there, at times too much noise, but the tools listed can help you keep on top of it.
all those listed features can be all incorporated into the igoogle page. The is a reason why igoogle is the fastest growing google property. Its simple and easy to implement. Plus google auto-fowards you to that page…lol jk.
BTW…whens web 3.0 expected to hit shelves?
Kelsey
http://www.helpuu.com- the google-powered search engine that helps
techmeme is the best.Thats it.
I like Firefox RSS reader: Sage. Simple and very nice.
Google Reader has the added benefit of Shared Items from other fellow users, so if you don’t have time to catch up with your feeds that day, at least you can skim through friends’ shared items to see whether anything of interest has bubbled up to the surface.
It’s also pretty easy to use on mobile phones – I’ve used it on both the N95 and the iPhone and it’s a comfortable experience.
As for Twitter, it’s an acquired taste and an addiction, mate!
I actually think a bit different (but still similar
I realized that I don’t check my RSS Reader as often as before, most of the news that I care about, supplied by my Friend(s)feed (twitter, pownce, digg, youtube etc,.)
My 2 cents here:
http://blog.go2...ided-by-my.html
Hey i think all these features can be incorporated into the igoogle page.
There is one called Netvibes and it’s Ginger version. They are good readers. I’ve been using them. I prefer them over Google reader at least. Haven’t used IGoogle a lot.
http://www.netvibes.com
You missed Netvibes I guess. A lot better than iGoogle, but I’m currently considering switching to Google Reader, as 98% of my time on NV is feeds, and it’s not really perfect feed reader (igoogle being even worse) – unfortunately the OPML export feature has gone somewhere during last redesign, anyone noticed that?
I also do some good old surfing and browsing single pages – it has some retro feeling to that.
Important in keeping up with fresh stuff are also alerts (I use those by google – http://www.google.com/alerts, there is a seperate one for blogs).
hey guys, i just finished building my memetracker. Actually what it does is to cover many stories which are not covered by techmeme. It’s not meant to be like techmeme but rather a complement.
I’ve been using this for while and decided to make it public. Have a go and let me know what you think. here it is : http://www.techsted.com
We’ll make it easy with web2.0rss.com — soon
So can you post your Google Reader Trend? I’m curious about your top 40.
My stats is probably laughable compared with yours, as I’m busy with my work and kids…
“From your 102 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 16,446 items, starred 0 items, shared 0 items, and emailed 0 items.”
I used pretty much all of those my only complaint is that bloggers are a bit slow pimping their content on twitter, I normally have read it by the time it ends up on thier twitter feeds. If you post a story you should then twitter it at the same time.
There is a wordpress plugin there for sure. I intend to write one to do this for diystartupnews so if I will share it if there is not one there already.
I don’t use techmeme because I read all the main sites and I don’t like to read the same thing twice. If you go on a site like originalsignal.com you can spot the big story from there because all the main blogs have it.
GigaOm is linked to techmeme, correct it
Check out Eluma: http://www.eluma.com. This is the problem we try to address.
We let you organize web pages and RSS feeds in a consistent manner; create, share, and discover collections; comment and rate on any of the content, and set any feeds to alert you directly to the desktop. And it complements/works with personal start pages like Netvibes.
The performance and usability of a desktop app makes it like iTunes, but for all of your web stuff.
We just went into private beta yesterday. You can request an invite here: http://www.elum...BetaSignup.aspx
Thanks,
Joe Lichtenberg
VP, Bus Dev
Eluma
Well Duncan, Why write this article? You ain’t saying anything new or interesting.
Well, RSS are hidden treasure in our web 2.0 world. Many people do not know what it is or how to use it, however the majority of Tech Crunch readers if not all have a ‘feed reader’. There is however a slice of readers of this blog that still bookmarks this page or finds this page through a Google search. They are a lost cause. In this post relevant to the readership of this blog, I’m afraid not.
For those of you who want to keep up with your favourite feeds on mobile devices, check out Viigo. Viigo runs on BlackBerry and Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices. From your mobile device browser, go to http://getviigo.com.
Pete
Hey Duncan, we’d love to have you submit your Google Shared items feed over at http://www.ReadBurner.com
We’ve got a few fun things in store
We’ll see what we can do.. but, is web2.0 still worth tracking?
iGoogle with multiple tabs, plus I start the day with a 20-page tabset that includes TC amongst others ranging from MacRumors to Valleywag
People always ask me, ‘how do you know about all these obscure new technical things, like hosted apps and on-line databases – how do you keep up!”.
I then explain that I, as a contract product manager in the industry, have to be current, and that I use a feed reader annd use it to read maybe….100 feeds like TechCrunch, daily.
Then I show them how to subscribe. Now, they don’t all get it at first. What you say these people are less than smart – no no no…they are all my betters, make more money than me, and have better education. Even after I demonstrate the once over to them, many still ask, “how does that work again?”
It’s not them – it’s us, the ‘industry’, if you will. We have done a crappy job of explaing RSS, in including the very name and symbol, to the world of normal people.
We are not normal. We are web IT people. We click on everything and spend time commenting on each other’s blogs. There are normal folks out there that never got on board.
Take your own survey at the supermarket – “excuse me, do you what a blog is? RSS? Do you use a ‘feed reader?’
You will be surprised how isolated you are, knowlege wise, outside of the Valley and few isolated hotspots.
And by the way:
When I show normal people twitter, they all say, without exception:
“Why would I want to use that”?
I’d add twitxr.com to that list.
It’s like twitter + casual pictures + geolocation.
Great base to operate from. Sums it up for me. I live in IGoogle….because of Notebook and Reader.
Definitely twitter has grown on me.
@Duncan: You missed Alertle (http://www.alertle.com). This is what one of our users had to say to us: “I just found your feed reader, and i think it’s revolutionary! I use Google Reader a long time ago, but I signed up to alertle right after the demo.”
Lifehacker wrote that Alertle moves faster than Google Reader and has wider support for audio/video..
ReadWriteWeb wrote that Alertle is simple and ‘cool’ enough for mainstream users..
Mashable, Blogoscoped and some others had something to say about it as well..
How about you ?
A good feedreader, which aggregates content from most of the tech blogosphere is http://www.quazion.com
It gives you the top stories of many popular tech blogs like TechCrunch, GigaOM, ArsTechnica etc.,
And you dont even need to know about RSS or Atom for this. Completely web-based, and as easy as just opening the page.
I prefer netvibes.com
Yawwwwnnnnnn
Slow news day?
I’ll throw my toy in the mix. I’ve built my own Web Based RSS Reader, with a back end that tags articles to produce a tagcloud view of my feeds. I’ve been detailing it at tubejumper dot com. I also hit techmeme and digg to bump up the value of articles based on if they are on techmeme and how many diggs they got.
First thing in the morning I’ll have about 5-10 tags that bubbled up that I hit first and then work my way down until nothing jumps out of the cloud. Then I hit individual feeds to see what’s left. When the IPhone SDK hit the IPhone tag had so much weight behind it that it was the only tag in the cloud.
This is just a toy for me with no plans of releasing it.
This shows why the Flock browser is so good. Browser, start page, feedreader and core sites such as Twitter all working together. I am a recent convert, now don’t know how I could live without.
I cant belive that http://newsgang.net/ Newsgang is not on that list. I live there and twitter for all my news.
As far as a reader goes I suggest checking out Shyftr.
RSS reader built in to a social network. You can find new feeds through your friends or through what the community is talking about. You have a pocket (kinda like shared docs on google) where you can save favorite posts and videos. And you can now even shyft your friends pockets as a feed to your feed list. I have all my facebook and twitter feeds etc coming in as well.
It’s still beta, but runs very smooth and already has a ton of feeds in there, and importing OPLM is coming soon.