How to Create a "Blog Feeder"
One of the questions I am often asked is "How do you find content to blog about?" The answer is easy, I use my Blog Feeder. If you blog often I highly recommend setting one of these up as a tab on a personalized home page. Mine sits on Google, but you can easily use Windows Live, Netvibes or a host of other similar services. I recommend using a start page as a Blog Feeder over a traditional RSS reader like Bloglines since you may not want to see every item in the feed. These feeds tend to be massive in volume.
The first step is to determine what newsy topics you want to track. In my case, it's a snap. I blog about social networks, social media, Wikipedia and more. I set up a bunch of searches on Google News for these topics using the "OR" value (e.g. digg OR youtube, etc.) Each search generates a feed, which I have added to a special tabbed section of my Google Personalized Home Page.
Next up, head on over to Technorati's Discover section. Here you will find mini meme trackers across dozens of subjects such as music, television, tech, politics and more. Each section has an RSS feed. Grab that and add it to your Blog Feeder.
Last but not least, add some other sites like digg and/or diggdotus and relvant Topix.net feeds (each topic page has a feed link). That's all there is to it. Here's the result...
Do you know how Technorati Discover actually works? I haven't seen a methodology and am curious as to whether is is a meme tracker or controlled by editors.
Posted by: Todd Zeigler | Friday, September 29, 2006 at 10:45 PM
I personaly switch from Netvibes to Webwag, I love the slicky UI, the convenient toolbar and their ipod podcast player.
Posted by: Jane Davis | Saturday, September 30, 2006 at 03:48 AM
I get that you love the Google homepage functionality, but what's the difference between what you describe and setting up the feeds in an RSS reader like Bloglines or Newsgator?
Seems like you're trying to differentiate between an RSS reader and your "Blog Feeder" terminology. Is there a substantive difference between the two that I'm not seeing?
Posted by: Chris Thilk | Saturday, September 30, 2006 at 07:43 AM
RSS is wonderful, providing people provide full feeds ( see http://www.fullfeeds.com )
Posted by: Lee | Saturday, September 30, 2006 at 09:00 AM
If following news about RSS technology is important to you, I kindly suggest that you consider visiting the RSS Tool Vendor News site that I launched last week. You can find it at http://dutchisms.typepad.com/rss_tool_vendors.
Basically this is a reading list to which you can subscribe: if I add a new source, you'll be notified if your feed reader supports it.
I collect team blog posts, development news and posts from the blogosphere about and from all RSS tool vendors, as long as they are put in English and relate to RSS technology. Very interested in your feedback.
Posted by: Marjolein Hoekstra | Saturday, September 30, 2006 at 11:56 AM
http://dutchisms.typepad.com/rss_tool_vendors
Sorry about the period at the end of the URL in the previous post.
Posted by: Marjolein Hoekstra | Saturday, September 30, 2006 at 11:58 AM
I know a great website that is an endless source of blogging material. It's called Consumerist and it's one of the best examples of truly social media. People are coming together and demanding the truth and transparency from companies. Everyone should read this.
Posted by: Susan B.A. | Saturday, September 30, 2006 at 02:53 PM
Ah, Google doesn't have personalised tabs for any other domain bar google.com; I'm in Australia so use google.com.au so we'll have to wait a little. Thanks for sharing your method though; very handy.
Posted by: David Koopmans | Saturday, September 30, 2006 at 07:51 PM
Just curious as to why you aren't using a My Yahoo! page as a feeder.
I've been running the same searches on a Personalized Google page and a My Yahoo! page for a short while, and I find that the fact that you can set the Yahoo! page to display either the short summary often included in the RSS feed or (in the case of a Google search) keywords in context to be a time saver -- less irrelevant links to click.
That said, Yahoo! is a good deal clunkier to navigate, and it tends to not update the Google News rss feeds as quickly as they are updated on the Google personalized homepage.
But that's my mileage doing monitoring. Yours will certainly vary.
Posted by: Randi Mason, MLS | Saturday, September 30, 2006 at 11:41 PM
David Koopmans - not sure what you mean. I'm in Melbourne and just set up my personalised page as Steve has without any problems...
Posted by: martium | Sunday, October 01, 2006 at 10:34 PM
Now that I've actually gone through the steps of doing this, I think NetNewsWire is FAR less cumbersome. In fact, the easiest is Safari.
Google really needs to add an "Add this search to my Homepage" button to it's search results page. Unless I'm missing something, us Mac users have it far easier with Safari.
Posted by: Dave | Monday, October 09, 2006 at 07:37 PM
welcome to my blogs
Posted by: hotelssoftware | Thursday, April 19, 2007 at 02:56 AM
This seems to work based on adding RSS feeds to your blogg.
The problem with RSS feeds is you do not have control of the content and then there is the issue of duplicate content.
Great if you could write a post on duplicate content
Posted by: How to create a blog | Saturday, January 05, 2008 at 09:38 PM