Ways to Stay on Top of The News

If you’re a blogger, a journalist or just someone who feels that getting to news first is really important, you need to find sources that can get the news to you as fast as possible. Most people nowadays already use RSS feeds, but there are so many more ways! Let’s take a look at just some of the ways you can get the low-down before everyone else, and get to know cool services along the way.

RSS

RSS has been around for a while now, and due to ease of browsing and the info quantity you can go through, it’s not surprising how quickly it became popular. It reads feeds from websites and shows you a snippet. If you like the title you can click and read, or you can choose to see the whole thing right away.

The great thing is that you don’t have to visit a huge load of websites to read them and there are also aggregated feeds, bringing you the best of the web, or at least the part you like.

I think the most popular news reader is Google Reader, its speed, offline capability and simplicity goes a long way to making it the best. Plus dozens of Google Reader tips to customize it. If you’re searching for an alternative you can go for the Newsgator RSS suite which has recently become free and is also great.

Digg

Digg is another well-known source for anything really. I think very few people realize the news potential in it though and think it’s for randomly finding great sites. Sure, you can go to the news section to take a look at hot news topics, but there is so much more.

I think the best place to look is the upcoming section. It shows all the recently dugg stories and if you subscribe to this page’s RSS feed you’ll get all the incoming stories as they are rolling in. You do get a lot of junk and possibly some familiar stuff, but in the end, Digg front page stories start somewhere too.

Newsvine

Newsvine is another popular place for news, and on Newsvine I think it looks more “newsie”. There are many journalists and writers who have a column there, so if you keep track of the page you’ll probably catch all the new stuff before it becomes popular.

Newsvine is great because you can create your own column too, and you can use the stories you read if you want. You can do it just for yourself, creating a blog-like newspaper for archiving purposes, containing all your favorite stories, or you can release it publicly, if you have a good eye for news, you might just make some money too!

DailyMe

DailyMe is a unique news service because it simulates the newspaper feel as much as it can. It gives you the flexibility of the web, content on demand, and combines it with the look and feel of a newspaper, something I enjoy reading very much.

You can choose your topics, even narrow them by keyword and you get a daily digest of news every morning. The great thing is that you can get it as a simple email, a pdf in an email, and best of all, you can set it up with your printer to print out automatically in the morning.

That is just so cool, imagine waking up, taking a shower, and by the time you pour yourself your cereal, your news is all printed, ready for you to read. That’s what I call a morning!

Other options

If you look around the net, you will find tons of options. You can combine all these to get a huge daily news dose in your inbox, or you can narrow it down to a very specific subject you like. There are also substitute sites to Digg and Newsvine.

Filed Under: Cool Websites ¦ Lists of tools
Tags: Digg, feedreader, feeds, How-To, news, reading, RSS