[I have several main info streams that I pay attention to these days and they are probably not what you would think. Here is part 1 of 10.]
INFOSTREAM STRATEGY #1: iGoogle Page and multi-tabbed groups of feeds
Oh how the RSS feed has changed in the last 3 years for me. It was interesting describing what RSS was to a friend who is getting up to speed on the web. My final explanation went something like this. "When I find a site I am interested in reading, I look for the RSS button and add their content to my iGoogle page."
This was informative to ME for several reasons. 1.) If the site is not about DESIGN or VISUAL MEDIA I pay very little attention to the site itself. I subscribe to the RSS feed, and then when the widget pops up on my iGoogle page I scan the latest posts for interesting topics. Occasionally I will immediately delete the widget if the user does not have Informative Post Titles. When the feed titles are "Link Summary 4-16-09" and "Link Summary 4-15-09" etc. then I am not likely to glean much interest in the future when I visit my iGoogle SocialMedia and SEO News dashboard. If I can't scan the headline/title and understand in 1 second or less, "is this of interest to me NOW?" then I won't ever spend the time to dig into the information further. There is just too much coming at me.
RSS RULE #1 Make the Title of your post relevant, clear and meaningful. If you are going to be cute, make sure you get the clear message across as well. Otherwise, why bother posting it. Unless you are Guy Kawasaki or Steve Jobs, I am not likely to browse your "Link Summary" posts. EVER.
What you can see from here are the widgets on my "WordPress" tab. Also you can see my other TABS.
- Home (my initial, general purpose TAB)
- Darn Funny (Colbert Report etc.)
- Dell and Competitors (cause I still care about'm)
- AAPL (Apple and all things iPod, iPhone and Mac related)
- Webmaster Tools (Google's Webmasters Tools widgets)
- Social Media (RSS feeds from around the SM planet)
- JMac Data (most of my various feed varieties)
- SEO SEM (search and search engine marketing)
And here's an interesting kicker: I can email you any of these TABS and you can have them just as I have the ADDED to YOUR iGoogle page. I'm not promoting that here, but I have made several TABS for friends and clients and then sent them the email containing all of the data, widgets and settings that I created for them. Then, if it's not a TAB I am directly interested in, I delete it from my dashboard. But that is a pretty powerful feature when you think about it. [And if you are interested in any of my TABS let me know.]
@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/infostream-1
[NEXT] INFOFEED #2 Tweetdeck
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