Organize Knowledge
How many blogs do you read regularly?
I began reading some marketing and technology blogs consistently in fall ’07. There are currently 44 blogs that I am trying to gain industry knowledge from each week. I am constantly amazed at the information I learn daily from these blogs. I (like many others) have found a tool that helps me save a ton of time and collects all the recent posts from these blogs in one place. This tool is called Google Reader.
Google Reader is an RSS reader. RSS is an electronic coding system that is like e-mail but it gathers the information and stores it in the RSS reader. There are many readers, I just happen to like Google Reader as I am a general fan of Google.
Interesting side note, I was at the Atlantic Internet Marketing Conference today and learned that 77% of all searches done on search engines in Canada are done using Google!
Google Reader is a free online tool that takes only seconds to sign up for and then you can easily subscribe to all your favorite blogs and keep them organized in one place. I have been using this reader for 6 months now and it has become an essential tool and time-saver because I no longer have to go to each separate blog to see if there are any new posts. I do still go to the original blog post if I want to contribute a comment. I would encourage you to try Google Reader and I would like to hear about your experience with RSS readers, please comment with your thoughts.
For those of you who do not understand RSS and how these readers work, here is a short 3 1/2 minute video tutorial that will provide you with a simple overview…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU]
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Hi David,
I believe I sat beside you today at Harold’s talk. Sorry we didn’t get a chance to connect. I see you were twittering AIM as well:) There were a few of us that were. Don’t you just love the common craft videos?
Hi Lisa, thanks for connecting. Sorry we didn’t get an introduction at AIM. Harold’s session was excellent (one of the best I thought). Yes, I absolutely love these Common Craft videos – they are perfect for those new to the technology – sometimes using “pictures” helps visualize the web process a little better.
Speaking of search engines, this is the breakdown for my site for the past year:
Google 95%
Yahoo! 2%
Ask Jeeves 1%
MSN 1%
All the rest 1%
Thanks for those stats Harold. That is a huge weight for Google on your site! I just checked a non-profit site that I manage and of the 20,000+ people that came to it via search engines in 2007, 76% came to it via Google…I guess that is pretty much bang on the Canadian average. Sometimes stats can be fun to review!
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