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?
AgetnGenius.com is not affiliated with NewsMap, theClozing, Alltop, Guzzle or Google.
Todd Carpenter
July 15, 2009 at 10:49 am
I use a feed reader. But instead of subscribing to rss feeds from specific blogs, I subscribe to rss feeds from specific google blog searches. I also use google news alerts, smart brief, and there’s internal staff here at NAR that monitor the web.
But the main tool I use to find interesting posts, is Twitter. That’s how I found this post.
Ryan Jones
July 15, 2009 at 10:55 am
Great links Lani. I agree it is very important to stay on top of the news if you are going to consider yourself a professional and a market leader. Which I hope we are all striving to be. Thanks again!
tomferry
July 15, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Hey Lani- Thx for the share with TheClozing Great site …. yours and Linsey’s blogs are right there front and center.
TF
jf.sellsius.theclozing
July 15, 2009 at 5:30 pm
@Tomferry– thanks for the support, Tom.
Lani, Thanks for mentioning theClozing.com
I use a feedreader. It regularly gets backed up and I have to run through 400+ sites– arrgh. So we decided to funnel a hand-picked feedreader thru an algorithm to pull real estate news and organize it in one place. We also added a human editor. The result– a fast, easy digest of news from mainstream and social media, regularly updated, like a ticker tape. We will be aggregating more social media news in the future.
IMO the feedreader is not very useful for real estate professionals who are working– it’s a time suck and it gets backed up very quickly, discouraging use. The majority of agents don’t even have one.
(I know we’re onto something because my wife is a regular visitor. She doesn’t have a feedreader. )
Besides the sites you mention, there is BreakingNews, which pulls hyperlocal Twitter tweets (I’m working with Pat Kitano & Kevin Boer on this project).
For current keyword mentions (news ?) I use Tweetbeep; Monitter, and Backtype, as well as Google alerts. (there are other stealth means)
The trend is definitely toward current news, thanks to Twitter. Even search engines are getting into the act of searching current news– take a look at Collecta.
That’s enough babbling. Thanks again.
PS: My partner in theClozing is Anthony Barba
Shane
July 15, 2009 at 7:14 pm
Thanks for the great news sites. Google does have a great feed reader.
jf.sellsius.theclozing
July 15, 2009 at 9:47 pm
BTW, I found this post on theClozing.
Jim Rake
July 16, 2009 at 9:03 am
Another reminder of why I keep coming back for more. Thanks!