Don’t Miss a Thing:Create a Personal Re-Search Engine
This is a guest post from Eli Gratz, a tireless innovator currently working in Hyderabad, India on a 6 month project. His last post, 8 Tips for Successfully Living and Working Abroad, was a very popular and useful look into the lifestyle of a worker based abroad.
The Internet is filled with wonderful content and rich resources for finding new information. Sadly, it is tough to keep on top of new events and developments and topics that are interesting to you and your career.
Luckily, thanks to our friends at Google, you can couple two of their products to create a customized “research engine” which will consistantly provide you new and relevant articles, blogs, and updates on content you find relevant. Let’s face it: no one knows when new items are available like Google does…
What to do:
Step 1) Get a Google Reader account
Google Reader is a free web service which requires a Google Account to login (this is the same as your gmail id if you use gmail). It is an RSS Reader, which means it collects and stores items from RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds from various sources (see RSS in Plain English video here).
Step 2) Checkout Google Alerts
Much like Dan talked about here, Google Alerts is a great way of having Google send new content your way when it finds it. So if you set up a Google Alert for “Newly Corporate“, each time the term “newly corporate” is found on a new site, Google Alerts adds that item to the feed. It is pretty amazing.
The real innovation came when they offered not only email delivery of items, but also delivery via RSS feed. The beauty here is that when you have the RSS feed hit your Google Reader, the items sit and wait for you as “unread” until you have time to get to them. It takes clutter out of your inbox and let’s you take in the content on your own terms. It’s a great example of communication segmentation.
Step 3) Get your keywords right!
Google Alerts will only be helpful if your keywords are precise enough to give you relevant content, but broad enough that there is a steady stream of articles.
Some of my Google Alerts include: (all links to the alerts)
Generation Y
“Eli Gratz” (to see what Google is saying about me in real-time and it is mostly Twitters)
And Many others
Step 4) Make the alerts and get the delivery right!
Go to google.com/alerts and start creating alerts based on your keywords. The key is to go into the alerts dashboard and change the delivery method from “e-mail” to “feed”. The feed will then automatically show up in your Google Reader account!
Step 5) Extra Credit
If the power of Google isn’t enough for you, then you can also use other feeds to pepper the Google Reader.
I love search.twitter.com‘s feeds. This will let you see tweets that mention a keyword. Nice to get a pulse of the twitterverse.
Step 6) Read, Star, Share and Search
So now that you have this amazing custom re-search engine (because it gives you research on your topics…get it?) you need to use it! A clean RSS reader is a happy RSS reader. Make sure you check in when you have some time and see what’s happening. Star your favorite articles. Share them via email or your own RSS feed.
This re-search engine concept has helped me find great content, new articles and stay on top of events for my career and personal projects. It segments these communications so I can read, review and search them on my own terms in their own service. Hope you enjoy creating a re-search engine, it really changed the way I get my information.
Image credit: jrhode
Subscribe in a reader
This is awesome. I am finally getting to the point where my old-school information management techniques aren’t sufficient. I’m trying to find good strategies for collecting info (as discussed here) and publishing my own content/online activities like links and pictures. This is one step in the right direction. Now I want to find a way to aggregate all my own stuff to push out from one feed.
Dan,
There are a lot of cool tools out there to aggregate RSS content. One of the best is making a feedburner.com network. It’s a bit tricky (since they got acquired by Google and you need to monetize every feed before you use it) but you can pipe together all kinds of feeds and info.
Also check out Yahoo Pipes…pretty amazing graphic utility for that.
Best of luck