... not only sounds cool; it is cool.
Amy Gahran, who maintains the Poynter Online blog
"E-Media Tidbits," posted this tip in a comment to my first post on this blog.
4 Use RSS feeds to follow new developments on your beat without having to visit a hundred different Web sites everyday.
But how do you create a search feed?
Here's Amy:
There are many online resources for following current news and discussion of just about any topic. For instance,
Google News lists mainstream news stories,
Technorati tells you what people are blogging about,
Podzinger indexes audio podcasts and
Digg tells you what people think is worth reading.
Searching these kinds of free services can help you find
ahead-of-the-curve leads for your beat, or zero in on unique context to
round out a specific story.
You can do those searches the hard way or the easy way. The
hard way is to go to any or all of these sites once or more daily, type
in your search request, and scroll through the list of results. That
takes a lot of time and manual effort.
The easy way is to generate RSS feeds from these sites based
on your search criteria and subscribe to those feeds in your feed
reader. Then you only have to look in one place to see all the latest
updates, and you'll find out about them virtually as soon as they're
published. Instant gratification is good, especially on deadline.
Here's how it works. I cover environmental issues, and
right now I'm starting a new project about carbon taxes. One of my
first tasks is to set up a series of search feeds.
- In my feed reader, Newsfire, I created a folder called "carbon tax."
- Over at Technorati, I enter the search query "carbon tax." Here are the results.
- In the top right corner of the Technorati results page is a "subscribe" button. Click that.
- That sends me to this feed page
displaying this feed of the latest blog posts that match the search
query. I copy the URL of that page from my Web browser's location bar.
- I switch back to my feed reader, tell it I want to add a new
feed, and paste in the URL I just copied. I save that feed subscription
in my "carbon tax" folder.
- I duplicate this process for a bunch of other online resources for fresh content.
Here's what it all looks like in my feed reader,
when I'm done. On
the left are my search feeds in the "carbon tax" folder. On the right
are the latest matches from all of those feeds.
Yes, that's a lot of content to scan through, but it's
much simpler and faster to scan my feed reader than
to search site-by-site.
You can set up general search feeds to cover a beat -- i.e. Alabama environmental -- or on the fly for emerging, immediate topics of interest -- i.e. "Kalamazoo River" Superfund.
Tweak your search queries and regenerate feeds as needed to refine results.
Big thanks to Amy.
Later this morning, the workshop begins, and I'll start flooding this blog with tips. Don't let that stop you from commenting or e-mailing me with tips of your own -- just like Amy did. And feel free to weigh in on the tips I'm posting.
Coming soon >>> One more post before I sleep.
Hey Pat, glad you liked this. Hope this helped, and...
