The NY Times had a nice roundup of tools and strategies to conquer information sprawl last week, Staying Informed without Drowning in Data, by Jenna Wortham. At the end of this post I list the links of the various websites and tools mentioned.
In the fast-paced world of tech PR, there is no greater imperative than keeping up with the buzz of the day. The article made me reconsider my own techniques for staying up-to-date. So, I thought it would be interesting to explore this topic and share my results in a series of posts.
The exercise involves evaluating the available information sources, matching these up against needs and then figuring out a way to manage the flood of information.
In terms of sources, there are the online counterparts of traditional media brands, online only news media, blogs, sharing and bookmarking sites such as Delicious and You Tube, social news sites and micro blogs. This is how things break down at a high level, of course there is tremendous variety in each category.
As far as information appetite, the types of information that I like to track (on a business level) include:
- Media, blog and micro-blog mentions of my clients and their competition
- Media, blog and micro-blog discussions of related trends and topics
- Topics that are being buzzed about, the rising stories
- General business and political stories and trends
Further, it is good to be able to go beyond the headline and main story and explore chatter in the various blogs, forums and comment threads (why not throw newsgroups and email lists in for good measure)?
There are fee-based services that can provide help in collecting and filtering information, ranging from those that got their start focusing on traditional media and in varying degrees have expanded to include blogs and online media (Nexis, Factiva, Meltwater) to those that specialize in monitoring online media and conversations, such as Radian 6 and Buzz Logic.
The latter category would seem to be pretty much a requirement in terms of doing a good job tracking online media and conversations if you are working with larger companies and well known brands; in which case you need something that is “industrial strength” to wade through all of the mentions.
For this series I will focus on the freebie services and strategies. I start by listing the ones mentioned in the NY Times article, which included a bunch that I have not worked with.
I list them under the categories cited in the article:
Social News and Bookmarking Sites
Digg
Reddit
Propeller
Delicious
Mixx
Newsvine
Meta Social News Sites
NewzNozzl
Stories from Selected Sources
Addictomatic
Yahoo! Buzz
BuzzTracker
RSS Feed Readers
Blogging.com list of RSS readers updated for 2017
RSS Filters
ReadBurner
RSSMeme
LinkRiver
Digitized Newsstand
Tabbloid
Feed Books
