Tuesday Tech Tip #2: Blog Aggregators / RSS Readers

Following up on last week's tip about Google Alerts, this week let's take a look at another essential information management tool: blog aggregators, also known as RSS readers.

RSS is a technology that allows sites to make their content available in a structured way to other sites and applications. In plain English, that means another site can run their headlines automatically, or that you can use a tool to read content from multiple sites in an organized way, and without having to browse around to all the different web sites. That's what a blog aggregator does.

RSS is used by blogs, but also by news providers, article banks, and others. You can use a blog reader to monitor and read industry-specific news providers or blogs that cover the topics you're interested in.

Taking it a step further, many blog search engines, including Google Blog Search, IceRocket and PubSub let you create a custom RSS feed of search results, so you can monitor just the information you want from the multitude of news and blog sources out there.

One of the most popular, and my blog reader of choice, is Bloglines. I like it primarily because it's web-based and free. It also has a ton of cool features, including the ability to organize blogs by folders, create a custom feed of your favorite posts, and more. Our Weblogs Guide Shai Coggins has a step-by-step guide to setting up Bloglines, as well as a list of other blog aggregators.

The combination of blog aggregators and custom search feeds from blog search engines is a powerful tool for keeping up with your industry, your competition, and any other topics of interest to you.