CT Biz Blogs

Ok, finding blogs to read, and then adding them to your RSS reader is all well and good, but the next three reasons for using RSS will really make you a lean, mean, feed reading machine! You, the small business owner, can not afford not to keep up with industry news, trends, and the doings of competitors. And while you’re at it, you can streamline your life by using RSS to keep tabs on local and national news, sports, info about companies whose stock you own – the list gets longer every day.

All because of those little orange buttons and the magic of RSS.

I want to reiterate that this post is by no means a comprehensive look at all things RSS. I’m sharing the things I’ve used RSS for, in the hopes that it will encourage you to start using this tool.

Here are the main ways to keep on top of topics of interest via your RSS reader, besides reading other blogs:

• Search engines
• Newspapers and other online news services
• Other people’s bookmarks and tags

Search engines

I mentioned blog search engines like Technorati when I wrote about ways to find blogs to subscribe to, in part 1 of this article. But you can also subscribe to Technorati search results! This is the way to go when you want to keep tabs on a topic across any blog that Technorati finds has mentioned the term.

To use Technorati, you need to create a watch list for the topic you want to follow. It’s not hard to do that, and Rich Brooks, of Flyte, has created a nifty how-to demo for Technorati watchlists.

Once you get a term or URL into your watchlist, you can subscribe by RSS.

The text is misleading, since you don’t really want to “view in RSS format.” Don’t do a normal click on the link, but instead right-click and select “copy shortcut” or “copy location” to get that URL. Add that to your feed reader of choice.

Once you do that, you won’t have to log into Technorati to actually use it — new items in your watch list will come up in your RSS feed reader.

Technorati isn’t the only blog search engine that does this trick — I’ve just started looking at Feedster (so many cool tools, so little time!) and it’s pretty slick.

With Feedster you can search blogs, news, or every-darn-thing, and then subscribe to results.

See how easy it is? Keep track of your favorite athletes, politicans, and criminals (or any combination of those) with a click of the mouse.

Tomorrow, the final installment (unless I get too carried away).