Here is how Bob Cox – president of the Media Bloggers Association and publisher of The National Debate – answered the question: how do you keep up with all the information coming at you from every direction?
I’m not sure I have any “secrets” but I do have some “preferences”. As President of the Media Bloggers Association, most blog tool developers send me a request to try out their latest, greatest toy and as a confirmed gadget geek I invariably try them all including all those on your list. I have scrapped most of them and settled into a routine that works for me
Email.The best source of information is suggests from readers. I can’t possibly read every email – or check out every recommendation – but I skim them all and click on the ones that catch my eye. I have tried a variety of spam blocking solutions but have always come back to the tried and true method of using my rules wizard to sort incoming mail into prioritized mailboxes and then having everything else dump into a junk mail folder which I skim once a day before hitting “delete all”.
Safari Browser: as a recent prodigal Mac user (before I purchased a PowerBook G4 last fall my last Mac was a pre-color Powerbook 140 ( I am in love with the RSS capability built in to Safari which allows me to leverage traditional bookmarking with RSS to create RSS feeds by subject (Media, Technology, Politics, etc.)
Technorati: since few bloggers get paid it’s all about the link love, baby. There is nothing better than an “Egorati” search with lots of links back to my blogs to cheer me up after a long day in the blogwar trenches.
Google News Alerts: my alert subject change all the time depending on what’s hot in the news but this poor man’s LEXIS/NEXIS gets the job done.
Webalizer: bills itself as a “fast, free web server log file analysis program” that produces “highly detailed, easily configurable usage reports in HTML format, for viewing with a standard web browser.” Although I still have a few small blogger.com sites up, I moved to a dedicated hosting provider Zubr Communications long ago and make sure to check where my readers are coming from and what links they are clicking on my site to get a sense of who I ought to be reading.
The Truth Laid Bare Blogosphere Ecosystem: I like to see which blogs are moving up in the rankings, what they are writing about and why folks are flocking to those sites.
Memeorandum: you mentioned the “tech” version but I’ve been a regular reader of the original Memeorandum since MBA member Gabe Kapler launched the first iteration way back when and a big fan since day one.”
Related What’s Next Blog posts:
How I Keep Up With It All: My Top Blog Research Tools
Guest Post: Graham Holliday, Journalist & Blogger, Shares His Top Blog Research Tools
Top Bloggers Share Their Favorite Research Tools
