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How I Keep Up With It All: My Top Blog Research Tools

Posted by B.L. Ochman The question I am asked more often than any other is "how do you keep up with all the information coming at you from every direction?" So I thought I'd share some of the research tools I can't blog without.

Google and YahooNews Alerts send me emails when artilces with my name or other keywords I follow appear online. They miss a lot, but they pick up a lot I might otherwise not see right away.

Bloglines RSS feeds. I subscribe to 158 feeds from blogs and news sites at the moment, and check the headlines in my newsreader every morning. You can see my feeds here

Technorati is the site where I track who's linking to me; what the top topics are in blogs at the moment; to find blogs on particular topics and lots more.

Lifehacks tracks the most popular items posted on del.icio.us over the last 24 hours

Tech Memeorandum to follow technology business news from blogs and MSM

Digg a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.

And I have Firefox with multiple browser tabs open at all times

Wow! As I put this list together, I realize there are many other tools I use, so I will write about them from time to time. I lack the geek gene that many bloggers have, so I promise that nothing I tell you will be technically challenging.

I'll be reporting on how other bloggers find the information they blog about over the next few weeks.

What tools do you use to stay up to date? Please share them with us!

Categories: Blogging and Moblogging

BL Ochman | Apr 12 06 10:54 | TrackBack (0)

Comments

Funny I should just receive your newsletter with this topic - I was JUST finishing up a newsletter I do, and pondering how I can no longer keep up with all of the news sources I track. And each day, I find several more! Thanks for the tips on how you keep it together.

Posted by: Dan at April 12, 2006 2:22 PM

I use a private install of Scuttle for social bookmarking. More of a backup-brain than anything else. I actually like it better than del.icio.us and the fact that it's behind a password challenge means that I can pretty much say what I want to say about the links I'm pointing to.

Posted by: Phil Gomes at April 12, 2006 6:47 PM

We would like to introduce you to our Megite: What's happening right now service. It is the newspaper for anyone interested in what's happening right now by intelligently uncovering the most relevant items from auto discovered news sites and weblogs.

From the blogrolling list on your blog, we created a personal Megite for you at http://www.megite.com/index.php?section=whatsnextblog

Posted by: matthew at April 13, 2006 12:23 AM

Good meme here.

I use MonitorThis for search feeds.

Newsgator for RSS (I find this much more flexible than Bloglines. If you want to see a demo account, login at http://newsgator.com username: marshalldemo pw: welcome)

I like memeorandum as well.

I use Onlywire.com to bookmark into multiple services.

Yotophoto for stock images

FeedRinse.com to filter feeds for keywords.

Immedi.at for RSS to IM notification

Watchthatpage.com for page change notification

Feedfire.com and Wotzwot for feed scraping, mail2feed.com for email to RSS

Del.icio.us look-up bookmarklet, archive.org, WhoIs, ElfUrl and Bugmenot for various purposes.

Blummy.com to hold lots of bookmarklets

Them's my faves.

Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick at April 14, 2006 9:42 PM

B.L., I love NewsGator Online. Well, sometimes I hate it because it never stops cramming posts down my throat :) ... but it is indispensable in helping me know exactly what our 45-ish authors are saying on 50-ish blogs, as well as reading the best of the blogosphere. I've got about 350 feeds in there at the moment - too many, I know :).

I also adore cocomment - I use it to track my comments on the Web. So far it's a bit buggy, but that's to be expected from such a new service and I don't know of any better alternatives.

What else, what else? Let me think ... I certainly use all the tools you mentioned, and especially I have to say I couldn't survive without Firefox.

Posted by: Easton Ellsworth at April 15, 2006 12:33 AM

My priority in the morning:

1) primary interests
- Greatnews as primary source - first thing I look at (http://www.curiostudio.com/)
- Within GN I read rss feeds from google searches on my main topics
- then its some core sites that have feeds on my topics
2) News - bbc, google news
3) secondary
- google desktop/ gmail web clips
- friends
- blog subscriptions, when I get around to them

Posted by: Colin at April 15, 2006 4:21 PM

I really like PubSub, which I've recently discovered, as a measurement tool. But I understand it won't be around much longer. ?

Posted by: paul baker at June 16, 2006 12:28 PM

People tracking public policy may find Stateline useful. http://www.stateline.org/live/ViewPage.action
This resource offers many RSS feeds:
Top News
Issues
State-specific

Posted by: paul baker at June 16, 2006 12:35 PM

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About BL Ochman

Blogger, social media strategy consultant to Fortune 500 companies, and sought-after corporate speaker B.L. Ochman heads the creative team of whatsnextonline.com. She also publishes the Ethics Crisis blog for SRF Global Translations

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