CT Biz Blogs

Here’s the third and final part of my post about ways to find RSS feeds. (Part 1: Blogs; Part 2: Search Engines.)

Newspapers and other Online news services:

Many online newspapers, such as the New York Times or the Hartford Courant, have RSS subscriptions to different topics. Typically these won’t have the entire article in the feed, but instead will deliver to you the headlines, sometimes with an short excerpt. This is usually enough to determine if that article is something you want to read. If it is, click on the link in the feed to go right to that article. Piece of cake!

Some magazines, such as Business Week, are also putting articles online, with feeds.

Aside from getting feeds from newspapers and magazines, you can search across new sources with services such as Topix.net. I use it to send me mentions of my home town and companies I’m interested in.

For example, you can go to Topix.net, and type in the name of a company, such as General Motors. You’d get a page that looks something like this:

If you scroll down to the very, very bottom of the page, you’ll see a little orange symbol that means this page has an RSS feed.

Right click on that, select “copy link location,” or “copy shortcut” and add that URL to your feed reader.

You’ll start getting new articles in that topic right in your reader, immediately, in the same way you get blog posts.

Other people

One of the most exciting ideas to come along on the internet is that of social bookmarks and tags. These represent a way of bookmarking and organizing online information in a manner that facilitates sharing with others.

For example, using the free service del.icio.us, people bookmark web pages to a central online repository. Anyone else can come along and view these bookmarks, to see what other people have found.

But wait, there’s more!

Not only can you view bookmarks, you can also subscribe to them via RSS feeds. You can subscribe to a person to get all the public bookmarks someone creates, or you can subscribe to a “tag,” (a descriptive keyword).

For example, I created a tag I call “blog_strategy.” That contains web sites and blog posts which have ideas and tips for writing blog posts. (One of these days, I’ll get around to reading them, too.) Not only can anyone view this tag, anyone can subscribe to it, too, and any new item I tag with “blog_strategy” will show up in someone’s feed reader inbox.

The link for my del.icio.us bookmarks is in the right sidebar, at the bottom of the page.

These are just a few of the things you can do with RSS. There are more coming all the time. If you’re ready to drink from the firehose, here is a link to the del.icio.us tag: RSS.

If you want me, I’ll be shopping.