You don’t really see the benefit of RSS feeds and a reader if you are working with very few sites.  If all you need is to check cnn.com for your news and yahoo finance for your investments, you might look at an rss reader as a hassle or a way of complicating your daily routine.  If that’s all you are using them for then I agree.   But what if you end up visiting the same 10 sites every day which is very common and becoming more common each day.  At that point, you might start seeing the beauty of the rss feed and reader and start using them regularly.

What an rss feed essentially does is it pulls news and articles from all over the web and brings them into a nice, easy to read format.  By just visiting your reader, you will get the same information that you would have from opening each individual site but with a reader, you don’t have to keep checking if each site updated every day (or every hour or even minute).  Even breaking news travels to your reader fast enough to be on top of it.  All you have to do is open your reader and if the sites updated, the new articles are in your reader.  Simple as that!  You can relax knowing that all the information you would be looking for will come right to you as it happens.

Alerts: Google and Other

RSS feeds are not exclusive to Blogs and news sites, you can create your own feeds based on many criteria including google alerts, blog alerts, keyword alerts and searches from most search engines including twitter.  By setting up the right alerts, you can pretty much listen to what the entire world is saying about any particular topic (including your business) in real time.

Every company, organization and in most cases, even individuals should have alerts set up for themselves, their businesses, organizations, products and industry.  It will put your finger on the pulse of the trends and what the future may hold.

Where the rss system works exceptionally well is in a misunderstanding or crisis such as a scandal involving your business or organization.  During a crisis, you become overwhelmed with everything that needs to get done, responding to the situation and building a strategy to get through it.  You don’t have time to sit and search the web over and over again to find  everything that is being said about you.  With an rss reader, you can create as many alerts for websites, keywords, terms and people as you like and have them come right to you as they happen.  All you have to do is keep the reader open in a browser and refresh every once in a while (if auto refresh is too slow for you).   In many cases, you can subscribe to comment feeds as well and hear what the average people are saying that don’t have their own platform.

To put all of this into practice, use some of the resources below:  I suggest using Google Reader for all.

1) What is an RSS Feed? Some Quick FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions): Learn the basics.

2)      Google Alerts: http://www.google.com/alerts. First, sign in to your Google account or create one if you don’t have one yet.  Then enter your search term such as your company name, an individual at the company or any other related term that you would like to keep track of (enter it as if you were searching Google).  Choose what types of information you would like collected such as news, blog posts, videos, etc.  I would suggest “Comprehensive” so that you get it all but it would really depend on what you are looking for.  Then in the deliver menu, click “feed” to have the results delivered to your feed as they happen.  Rinse and repeat for all of the terms that you want to be updated about.  You can create up to 1000 Google alerts so don’t be shy.

3)      IceRocket.com: http://www.icerocket.com/. Enter your search term into the search bar and results will appear.  In the left sidebar, towards the bottom, there will be a “subscribe” link to subscribe to the feed.  Right click the link and choose to “copy link address”.  Then log into Google Reader and click on the “add a subscription” button at the top of the left sidebar.  Paste the link that you just copied on the IceRocket.com search.  The feed is now in your reader and will be updated as new posts are created.  Once again, rinse and repeat.

4)      Twitter Search: http://search.twitter.com/. Enter your search term in the search bar.  At the top right of the results page is a link to the “Feed for this query”.  To add the feed to your reader, follow the same steps as for IceRocket.com above.  You should be getting the hang of this already but once again, repeat for all keywords and terms.

The above resources should give you a very good start to using RSS feeds and reader to listen better to what the world is saying about things you care about, and save a heck of a lot of time in the process.

Do you have any other hints, tips or resources? Let me know in the comments.  Also, if this helped you, let me know.

In actuality, they are not competing directly with Bing and Google, rather they claim that they are a cross between Google and Twitter.  A place where you can search for relevant real time information and discussions.  This is great for the users and anyone who wants to search for popular topics in any category but may not be as great for the content creators.  If you have a highly trafficked block with tons of fans you may be ok or even well off but if you have been relying on SEO (search engine optimization) you may have a rude awakening.  If nobody is talking about you or your content, you will be nowhere to be found.

I don’t know if this is how the search will continue to work but it does give us a little glimpse into the future.  Cheap optimization tricks will not work for long and the only real way to get ahead is to be authentic, interesting and add value.  The more value that you provide, the better.

In general, search engines are getting smarter and catching onto the cheap tricks people use to try and get better ranking.  Just a few years ago, the most popular trick was to use white writing on a white background with hundreds of unrelated popular keywords to fool the search engine to thinking that your site had something to do with those words.  Search engine have come very far since then and they will not stop improving their search algorithms even when they are practically human.

Cheap tricks may get you so far but will never last.  True authenticity and great content will.

What does StumbleUpon’s search results say about you?

Just Google it

Google.com or other search engines such as yahoo.com, msn live.com, or ask.com can be great resources and should be the first place you turn when you have a problem. All the major search engines have extremely complex algorithms that are programmed to understand what the searcher is looking for and to give them the most relevant results.

To perform a search, just go to the search engine of your choice (click the links in the above paragraph) and enter whatever it is that you want to know. The search can be as simple as typing in “walmart” if you want to go to Wal-Mart’s website or as complicated as looking for information on where to find a rare tropical fish that you’d like to add to your aquarium.

Back to the computer error message, finding out what it means, and how to solve your problem is quite simple. Just copy the error message into the search engine and hit enter. You will most likely come up with results either from the software that you are using or from other people that had the same problem. By clicking on the top few results, you should get either the answer to your problem or a lead toward finding your answer.

Search through forums

When it gets more complicated the best place to look are forums on your topic. For example, if you are looking for a problem in Microsoft Outlook, search for “Microsoft outlook forum”. Once you find the forum you are looking for, browse around to find the answer you are looking for. If you don’t find your answer, feel free to join the forum and post your question. Most forums are filled with passionate people who will jump on the opportunity to answer your question.

Just knowing where to look for your answers can exponentially increase your intelligence.