2010 Guide to Technology: Advanced RSS

Jan 1st, 2010 | By Yana Siganur | Category: 2010 Tech Guide, Blogging, Featured, First Year, Law School, Lead Article, Social Media

Welcome to Social Media Law Student’s 2010 Guide to Technology. These posts will shine some light on various tips and tricks that you can use to become more efficient in your everyday life. The complete guide can be found here.

Once you’ve picked a good RSS reader, and have added and organized your feeds, you’re ready to get into more complex areas.

Browser plugins

Click on the browser you use and check out what is available. You’ll find various counters, notifiers, and add-ons for your feeds.

Clean up

The “80/20 principle” organizes your feeds into the most important and the not-so-important. It states that 80% of the value of all your feeds comes from 20% of those feeds. To apply this principle, separate your feeds into the top 20% websites that you read every day and the bottom 80% that you look at every once in a while (the ones with high unread counts). This way, you’ll be much less overwhelmed by the many feeds you decided to follow, you’ll save time, and, eventually, you’ll even delete the feeds you never read.

Once you’ve got that down, try using your reader options to sort your feeds into categories, folders, bundles, or tags.

Custom feeds and alerts

Go to Yahoo! News and use the search for a particular person, event, or topic. On the right-hand side, you’ll see a textbox called “GET UPDATES.” Click on the orange “RSS” box in that textbox and you’re good to go. Now you have a feed that will bring you the latest information on your topic of choice from every news site on the internet.

Besides readers, you can also have content forwarded to your email and mobile device (as SMS messages). Go to Yahoo! Alerts, select the type of alert you’re interested in and follow the instructions for setting up alerts. For example, if you’re flying to New York City in a few months, you can set up an alert for NYC travel and hotel deals by selecting “Travel Destinations” and then “New York City, NY.”

What to follow

Authors – Go to Yahoo! News, search for the author’s byline or column title, and then subscribe to the search as a feed.

Desktop wallpaper – Try here or here.

New TV show episodes – Go to TV Notify, search for a TV show, subscribe to the feed.

Finally, you can always browse Topix for any and every subject you’re interested in.