Top Bloggers Share Their Favorite Research Tools

The other day, I posted a few of the top tools I use to keep up with the massive flow of information I follow for this blog and my work in general. Then I asked a bunch of top bloggers to share their tools with me. What we have in common: we all use Technorati, Google Alerts, and Firefox. And all of us read online newsletters and follow forums and lists on topics of interest. There also are a number interesting tools that are new to me and maybe also to you. I'll run these posts over the next week or so, and welcome your additions.

Doc Searls, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and Sr. Editor, Linux Journal:

#1: I subscribe to keyword searches at Technorati and through an aggregator that also sees searches from PubSub, Google Blogsearch, Blogpulse and IceRocket. Mostly because I follow subjects more than people.

#2: I don't subscribe to specific blogs. Sometimes I'll look at my blogroll (which is full of errors and rot, hate to say). Sometimes I look at my "favorites" at Technorati, but not much.

#3: Email. People send me stuff.

#4: Newspapers and magazines. Lots of offline goodies there, requiring work to find online.

Besides that, I just surf around, basically.

My list is very similar to yours:

Bloglines
Technorati
Digg

But, oddly, I also get a lot of my info from reader tips and press releases. I subscribe to industry email newsletters too, and participate in the Adrants forum.

158 RSS feeds! My god!

I closely monitor several Internet discussion lists, read dozens of e-newsletters, have lots of friends who send me interesting clips, and occasionally open my Google News feeds and follow the links. But I'm not doing well at keeping up and often trash much e-mail unread.

More to come... some as guest posts. Watch for them.

Please share your tools with us.

Another tool to have in the bag is http://del.icio.us/. Use it for finding popular bookmarks on any subject (many are blog posts). Look at the bookmarks of the screen names listed early in the posting history. There’s something to be said for the people who link to the web pages that eventually become very popular.

I subscribe to 257 RSS feeds, but thoroughly follow about 100. Omea Reader lets me sort them in views so that I can look at the only blogs that apply to the blog I am writing for. I force myself to "mark unread" anything I haven't reviewed by the end of the day - otherwise I'd go nuts. I also use Omea to clip information when I see it.

CoComment to track my comments on blogs - a little buggy, but I couldn't track conversations without them.

Technorati and Del.icio.us, of course.

Believe it or, an open text document. When I'm aggregating information on a certain topic I cut and paste quotes and URLs to one text document for easy access as I'm actually writing the article.

And here's a useful list of some other tools which could be worth a look.

http://tinyurl.com/l7d7c

I forgot to mention Ecto which I've tried and really liked, but had trouble purchasing online. Think it could be especially useful for those with multiple blogs...