Why Develop a News Obsession?
Not only is having your finger on the pulse of the news a good idea because it is blog inspiration, but it helps you steer the big ship that is your business. Staying on top of relevant news is the best way to know what’s coming next. There are several ways to gather news (and of course ways to mesh several of these tools).
Five Ways
(1) NewsMap visualizes global news by category. It’s a modern visualization of a newspaper, so you’ll hone in on the information relevant to you the same way you do with a newspaper (by ignoring the parts that don’t matter to you). I love this tool because it is stimulating and gives me a broad view of today’s headlines and it updates itself frequently.
(2) TheClozing is the “real estate watercooler,” aggregating real estate headlines from news sources as well as blogs. Founder Joe Ferrara said the idea was conceived on a napkin at a NY diner ironically named “Joe’s.” The Clozing is great for the real estate industry because the algorithm updates related articles from around the blogiverse and helps agents keep their finger on the pulse of critical information.
(3) Alltop aggregates RSS feeds of many real estate blogs and is an easy non-committal way to read industry blogs without subscribing to them. A quick look at the overall picture can give you a sense of the current sentiment as you can see several hundred headlines on a single page.
(4) Guzzle allows you to customize search terms as well as see current headlines. This is a great alternative to subscribing to a lot of search terms that come to your email inbox and it is easy to delete topics, add topics and it’s cool that it is combing non-traditionally in some of the social networks rather than strictly google.
(5) iGoogle is a landing page for all of your google activities- you can have your calendar, tasks, docs, digg activity and (most importantly for this article) your RSS feed reader. Completely customizable, iGoogle is a well organized way to see the RSS feeds you’ve subscribed to along with the rest of your pertinent information.
What is your favorite way to aggregate your news?
