Keeping up with news, latest trends, industry happenings and research is important for any business. But when there’s so much information available, how do you get to see what’s most relevant for you?
Firstly, if your email inbox is anything like mine you’ve now doubt thrown your arms up in frustration many a time thinking “there’s gotta be a better way to manager information”. Traditional media e.g. emails, newsletters, mail – had information PUSHED at us. Social media (and a special tool called RSS whose familiar symbol you’ve no doubt seen on websites and blog) allow us to PULL the information we need, and thereby have more control over the messages that come our way each day.
Today’s contributor is Ken Burgin of Profitable Hospitality.
In this post he takes a look at an easy way for us to aggregate the most useful information and make it easy to access.
Keeping up with the flood of useful information online
You may occasionally want to turn off the outside world, but there’s a huge amount of top quality business information available if you can keep up with it. A new system called RSS may be the answer. You may find an informative website, a blog with regular and stimulating updates, or a government site with industry-critical news releases. It may be to do with food & beverage, but it could also be related to your private enthusiasm for tropical fish or motor bikes. These days, someone is writing passionately about every subject imaginable! One way to keep track of online information is to ‘subscribe’ to it using a system called RSS (Really Simple Syndication). This way, it comes to you. RSS is like ‘automated web surfing’, gathering news efficiently and instantly on the subjects you are most interested in. If the web publishers offer their information with an RSS ‘feed’, it only takes one click to start gathering the current and future news it offers. An RSS feed sets up a hidden page that normal websites don’t have. This page contains the contents (or the first few paragraphs) in a simple format and updates whenever a new post is written. This format allows the posts to be read by a program called an RSS Reader. The advantage to using an RSS or News Reader instead of visiting the actual blog or web page is that it’s much faster, especially if you wish to read the new content of dozens of websites or blogs every day. You will know it’s offering an RSS feed when it displays one of the orange symbols like those above, or invites you to ‘Subscribe with RSS’. Check the example on the right of the Profitable Hospitality Hot & Cool Blog. A good News Reader to start with is Google Reader and (it’s free). When you see a blog or website that offers an RSS feed, you either click on the RSS icon on the page you are subscribing to or copy the Location (URL) of the service and paste it into the channel of the RSS Reader by following the instructions in that application. Obviously clicking the orange button is a lot easier. Now whenever you check back to the Reader, it has gathered updates from all the feed channels you are interested in. Click through them one by one and if the first few sentences interest you, read the whole story. If not, move on to the next one. It’s a bit like how we read a magazine — it covers your general interests, but leafing through the pages you will see some articles that you read all through and others that you don’t. But this time the magazine has been delivered to your desktop. There’s a ton of very valuable information available online, so let’s hope your competitors haven’t heard of RSS yet.
TODAY’S TASK
Set up a Google Reader account and start to subscribe via RSS what used to come to you as an email.
Until tomorrow, Suzi
Additional Resources – RSS Readers Web: Bloglines Mac OS X: NetNewsWire Windows: NewsGator
