Where I get the information that gets into my brain everyday
(credit: Different in Japan)
Everyday, there hundreds of feeds to read and tons of email to reply. Still, if you only use these two sources, you will miss quite a lot of news. Here are some of the ways I use to keep up to date on daily news and information.
RSS feeds
This is what most people used to gather information. I think it is also the most targeted. You normally only subscribe to blogs and news feeds that you are interested in. This results in depth within the subject you are researching as most blogs have different related posts in a given subject matter. Now with services like Feedity and Yahoo Pipes, RSS feeds have become a more powerful tool.
Google alert
Gives you comprehensive information surrounding keywords/keyphrases. It can be set to be delivered to your email once a day, once a week or as it happens. This results in width in your information. You will know everything (within search engine constrains) that happens for your keyphrases.
Forums
While you can get groundbreaking news here too, mostly I join forums to get a feel of how different people is reacting to a subject. The emotions coming out of these forum post will add a new dimension on how I view the information.
Comments
There is a wealth of information contain within the comments from your own blog and other blogs. I really like to read comments on blogs. Especially for controversial articles and in-depth posts. I also found out that some blogs gets better comments that others. There are less “You rock!!!” and That’s a great post!!!” type of comments and more discussion-based comments. One of them is DoshDosh. Read especially his reply to others comments. An example: The Secret to Building a Popular Blog (and Getting Tons of Readers)
Started using twitter as a source of information after reading Twitter is Paying My Rent. Have not had any success with it as a information source. Maybe its the people I followed. It takes the right people to get the right source. Or maybe its the twitter client I used. Twitbin is not very stable and has lessen my user enthusiasm for twitter. Nevertheless, sometimes you can get unexpected and funny quips when you switch to the public timeline and follow it for a while.
Digg/Stumble/Del.icio.us
To find out the most popular information. I also use these sites to read the most popular articles. I want to know what makes these popular articles tick. How did the author write it? What attention grabbing header title he used? And I learn from it.
Now I pose a question to you. Do you have a go to source for information? Share with me and my readers in the comments.
Want to overload with information. Well, you can subscribe to the BlogMunch Feed and I will load you up.