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...