Lately lots of people have been asking me how I keep up with all the blogs. Good question! There's so much out there to read, and simply not enough time in the day. For example, all the blogs nominated for awards on recruiting.com are excellent reading, but I can't read them all every day.
This is not a new problem folks. Think of how many newspapers there are! If you add up all the Daily publications by the top 20 publishers there's well over 500 papers. And that's not all, if you really want to keep up there's also thousands of magazines, journals and digests. Wow. Its a full-time job just to track one single niche within an industry.
With blogs though, since just about anyone can be a published author and there's no way of judging quality until you've read some of the posts, the number is larger by several orders of magnitude. So... I "keep up with" lots of blogs, but I don't read them all. The key, like with reading the newspaper, is scanning headlines. Hey, look, its this simple: not every blog post will be relevant to my interests just like not every news story is important to me.
Here's my big secret :
I used to keep up with blogs using three RSS readers. One was my "start" page - the one that opens up every time I start a new browser window. On that one I had my "daily rags" including all the industry news, etc. The other was in my Outlook, feeding me emails when the bloggers I watch posted something new. Yet a third was a stand alone program that sat on my system tray and downloaded all the RSS feeds so I could read them offline, and I could scan for the ones that looked interesting.
Well I got rid of the one in my email, and I pretty much ignore my stand-alone RSS reader these days. Now I am down to two - the trusty old start page and my screen saver.
That's right, my scren saver.
Remember PointCast? I liked the fact that when I was on the phone and my screen went blank after 5 minutes of inactivity, I could read weather updates, get news headlines and a few other things. MSN now has a Beta version of a screen saver that does all that and more. Unlike Google Desktop, the MSN Screen Saver kicks in when my computer goes idle, which happens every time I get on the phone or leave for a "quick break."
Why is this so cool, you ask?
See the thing is I stare at my computer screen all day, even when I'm on the phone. When I look at my "sleeping" computer screen, instead of some wavy lines or an animation of some kind, I see headlines from all my favorite RSS feeds rotating right infront of my eyes. Its not just blog headlines though, its also my email, my instant message conversations, and info from friends' MSN Spaces. Of course I also have news headlines and weather updates, plus there's a search feature built right in so I don't even have to wake up my sleepy pal to search online. To top it all off, the background for all this cool info are my very own pictures. The screen saver overlays all this on top of beautifully displayed photos from my hard drive and from online sources.
Once I wake my computer out of slumber mode and go to a new browser window, I get the rest of my blog summaries from my start page, along with other features. For that I use live.com, but you can also go with spaces.msn.com, or my.yahoo.com. If you use both of these - the screen saver in combination with your start page - you can stay informed yet not overwhelm yourself or take valuable time to go scan every blog individually seeking something new or relevant.
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