PNeo

Some RSS/Atom Feeds for your Monitoring Tools

We've pulled together a little spreadsheet of useful feeds. You can add these to your feed reader to help you monitor what's being said about you (or your client, or any issue that you care about).

Take a look at Brendan's article: How to create a News Tracker with NetVibes for some other ideas.

This isn't a perfect list, by any means; but for most people, it's should be more than enough to get you off the ground. A lot of these feeds are hidden somewhere behind the sites that they come from; just try (for example) finding the feeds you're looking for on YouTube, Wikipedia, or Reddit without using this!

It will save you time, too. Hacking about with the URL cuts out about a minute of painful fiddling on the site. This is the commando way to do stuff. If commandos fiddled around with digital media monitoring, of course.

We've included Kingsley Joseph's Social Media Firehose - for a lot of people, that may be enough on its own - or already be too much. We prefer using separate feeds to creating one giant metafeed. Others don't.

A note of caution

Depending on the search engine behind the feed, different searches can give you wildly different results. For example q="hello world" can give different results than q=hello+world. You may need to play about with this. Your browser will convert non-standard "unsafe" characters used in search term (spaces, plusses, punctuation, and quotation marks, for example) into their safe equivalent. These can be recognised by the percentage sign before them, but can make the search term hard to read/create. If something is broken, it's most likely anything that looks like this.

%20 = (space)
%22 = " (double quotes)
%2b = + (plus sign)

If you're really determined to fix it, take a look at this useful tool for decoding/encoding URLs

Adding to the list

If you'd like to add to the list, please feel free to contact me.

The list

I've embedded this as a Google Spreadsheet (you can see the original here: some useful monitoring feeds. I'd appreciate any feedback on how this works for you.

how to

HOW TO: Manage YOUR RSS Feeds

If you're anything like me, you'll find that you have trouble keeping your RSS feeds under control. Here are a couple of useful articles to help you improve your RSS-fu.

1) Group your RSS feeds by context, not subject

Matt Wood suggests that you group your RSS feeds as you read them. Rather than grouping your feeds by topic (not always easy to do), group them by the way they fit your day. Matt suggests the following

News

Feeds from traditional news outlets. Matt reads these first thing in the morning

Can't Miss

Essential reading: his friends' blogs, blogs where he posts, etc.

Skip 'em

Stuff he wants to read when he has the time. What I'd call "grazing", I suppose

Not News

A combination of the Can't Miss and Skip 'Em groups (Google Reader's folders make this pretty easy to do). He reads these later in the day.

I don't know if this is the best way of organizing stuff, but the whole contextual approach (grouping stuff by how you use it, rather than what it's about) is very much part of the Getting Things Done (GTD) philosophy that 43 folders endorses. I rather like it...

2) Use a collection of tools to keep your news where you need it

Marshall Kirkpatrick (who writes for Techcrunch amongst others) explains how he keeps on top of thousands of blog posts a day by combining a set of tools. He (sort of but not explicitly) divides things into:

active monitoring

Once an hour, he checks his Netvibes account for high priority feeds. Once or twice a day, he checks Google Reader (for everything else)

ambient monitoring

He uses Gmail's Web Clips (the little stories that run across the top of the page if you use Gmail) and Snackr, a scrolling ticker, to monitor his priority feeds.

alerts

He uses Zaptxt, a RSS to IM/SMS alert system, to alert him to high priority items.

I'm a big fan of this right-tool-for-right-job approach: the more important this stuff is to you, the more you tend to want to specialize. I'm already using three things to do this (Netvibes for at-a-glance monitoring, Google Reader for my must-reads, and RSS FWD to push stories to my mail) but on the strength of these, I'm going to revisit... I think you have to find the way that suits you best, but reading through these two articles will help get you started... How do you organize your feeds?

how to, rss