7 Ways To Stay Informed And Up-To-Date Online
The internet is undoubtedly the biggest information resource available to mankind today. Irrespective of where you are and what you do, you can visit Google News or any other such website to get the latest news from around the world.
Considering the huge information overflow online, you can have some excellent tools which help you to effectively organize the information flow and help you stay informed and up to date everyday. Let’s take a look at some of them.
1. RSS
RSS or feeds as we like to call them is an amazing technology which lets you stay updated with various websites, blogs and journals in one place – your feed reader – which could be Google Reader, FeedDemon or any other one. We at Make Use Of love RSS and have published lots of posts up to now for RSS addicts. Do a search for “RSS” in our search engine and you’ll get all of them.
Assuming that most of the readers of this site already know all about RSS, those who’ve heard this term for the first time today (yes, believe it or not, RSS hasn’t gone mainstream yet ) should start making use of this technology immediately.
2. Google Alerts
Google Alerts is one of the most useful services by Google, especially for those who care to stay informed online. Through Google Alerts you can monitor a specific term or phrase and check what people are saying about it. Read more about it here.
3. MonitorThis
MonitorThis is an effective online reputation management tool which lets you subscribe to 20 different search engine feeds at the same time, for a particular search term. It includes all the main search engines including Delicious tag search and Flickr tag search.
4. Memes
Memes on the internet aggregate the information which quickly spreads from one blog/website to the other and present them in a river of news format. There are various such meme websites, the most famous of them being Techmeme, which aggregates the latest tech news from around the web. There is also RSSmeme which aggregates what people are sharing in their RSS readers.
5. DailyMe
I wrote an elaborate post on DailyMe sometime back and I think that it’s certainly one of the best personalized news aggregators available online which also boasts some nice features like the newspaper reading format.
6. FaveBot
FaveBot works like Google Alerts and lets you track your favorite keywords online. It allows you to monitor through various categories like blogs, books, DVD’s, events, music , podcasts, pictures and videos.
7. Twitter And Friendfeed
Both Twitter and Friendfeed, apart from from being cool ways to communicate and be social, also serve as a way to get the latest information about various events and happenings from all around the world.
Twitter also has its own version of Google Alerts called TweetBeep which alerts you via email when someone mentions a keyword on Twitter which you’ve flagged for attention.
What online tools do you use to organize your information flow and stay informed and up to date? Let us know in the comments!
(By) Abhijeet Mukherjee is addicted to the internet and loves blogging and freelance writing. He blogs about tech tweaks, blogging tips, productivity hacks at Jeet Blog
i can go http://www.jimmyr.com to stay informed
I’m a big fan of alltop.com to stay informed on specific topics.
I use WebSite-Watcher to keep up with all that happens online. It’s highly recommended.
http://www.aignes.com/
Website Watcher isn’t free!
Better check How to Monitor Websites that don’t have RSS Feeds, all free.
Good tips. I usually use RSS, Techmeme, Twitter (and Technorati to know who’s linking to me, although I could use GAlerts for it).
Not to be picky (ok, I am being picky) but techmeme really doesn’t have much to do with memes. Memes are usually little thoughts or expressions that have gained their own cult following and crop up in many types of media. Techmeme looks like it is just a tech news aggregator with the word “meme” it its name.
Now you could be even more picky and say that Techmeme is aggregating ideas and by definition, any idea is a meme. This is according to Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene” where language is the replacement for genetic selection and information transmission.
I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle, but generally I don’t think Techmeme really knows that much about why “the cake is a lie” or Rickrolls.
What about filtrbox.com ?
For monitoring specific pages, try http://www.watchthatpage.com
You can set up a group of pages to watch for specific keywords, e.g. watch TV listings pages, local events pages, theatre/film listings for any mention of Japan.
And it’s free unless you use it a lot – I’ve never hit the limit.
I live by Google Alerts and my technorati authority!