How Do You Keep Track, And How Do You Share?

Posted bySteve 11 Comments on How Do You Keep Track, And How Do You Share?

I’ve been wondering about how you lovelies a) keep track of blogs and news that you read, and b) how – if at all – you share it with other people.

For tracking, do you use an RSS reader, like google reader, visit a range of sites every morning to see they’re updated, receive email updates via feedburner, or wait for a message from the author about updates (I’m sure a lot of the people who read my blog who are on twitter don’t bother to subscribe to the feed, knowing that I’ll tweet whenever I post anything new, as I’ve just done with this 🙂 )

With sharing, I read a stat that said that the most common way for someone to share a weblink is still email – do you do that? do you use friendfeed, delicious, googlebookmarks, all those other things that show up when you click the ‘share this’ button at the bottom of any of the posts over at stevelawson.net?

I’m fascinated!

I’ve got a fairly well-stocked google reader set of feeds, but I’m often so busy reading things that people have tweeted about, that I don’t get round to it – I find twitter to be a remarkably effective filter for news and blogs…

What say you?

11 replies on “How Do You Keep Track, And How Do You Share?”

  1. Google Reader for me… I never use offline RSS apps, because I want to be able to access the same subscriptions from 2 computers and my phone. Mind you, I’m usually chasing a couple of weeks worth of backlog, so I arrived here via Twitter 🙂

    1. Google Reader for reading. If I’m falling behind (for example, if I’ve been away for a few days), I’ll happily zap unread items, particularly from the feeds that provide voluminous news updates.

      To be honest, I’m not sold on the idea of tweeting about every new blog post. If I want to see everything, I’ll follow the feed and so the extra tweet is just noise. A good news reader keeps unread items until I’m ready for them while Twitter is much more ephemeral.

      Twitter is my choice for sharing links that briefly catch my attention or are part of an ongoing conversation; for more permanent storage, I use delicious.com as an online tool. People are welcome to browse through my collection but that is for my own reference and the “sharing” is a side-effect.

    1. I generally use Google Reader for my news so I can monitor it from home, work or even on my phone. RSS feeds are great for tracking sites that update infrequently and there are even tools to generate feeds for sites that don’t have their own. I tend to scan through the latest updates and keep some for later reading. I do share some, but only have a couple of friends who would see those.

      One down side of RSS readers is that you don’t see comments, so I click through to some sites, like Steve’s, to see the responses. I’d like to see a tool that lets you monitor blog posts for new comments.

      The flood of updates can get overwhelming and so I drop feeds now and again. I have a few on my iGoogle page to keep an eye on what is happening.

      Having said all that I don’t take the feed for this site, but saw Steve’s tweet about it. My iGoogle also has a Friendfeed gadget that leads me to some interestign articles.

      I’m still waiting for tools that will automatically make me aware of blog posts that will interest me without having to subscribe to each feed. Where are the intelligent agents we were promised?

      I don’t know if Google Wave will bring benefits in this area. We shall see.

  3. I’m using google reader, but honestly.. I am so behind. If something comes through my twitter stream and I’m there… I read it. I know I’m missing a lot of good stuff because I don’t have a good system.

  4. Like they said – Google Reader so I can use it on multiple machines, and my phone (Nokia – the Opera Mini browser rocks!). If a post looks like it will have good comments, I click across to it to read them.

    For sharing I use delicious. I have a “shared” tag for especially interesting items, and I’ve pointed people at the RSS feed for that. I also occasionally use the “Email this” link in Google Reader.

  5. I use an offline reader, as a matter of fact
    The amount of feeds I was receiving through google was too much to read in the way they displayed it!

    Agreed on the Twitter front, I follow nearly all of the RSS feeds I subscribe to and when I see it posted there I’m about 100% more likely to read it than on my aggregator!

  6. Google Reader for reading for me as well, but also increasingly Twitter for filtering. I am following a couple of football blogs on twitter who tweet their popular/recommended/favorite blog posts which I then read and largely skip many of the other ones in google reader. Also, I only check google reader every so often..
    Twitter and facebook for sharing stuff: Facebook for my Danish audience and Twitter for my international one 🙂 I never use the built in sharing options for any site ever though (the ‘share this’ button e.g.)

  7. Opera – http://www.opera.com

    It’s a web browser/e-mail client/RSS feed reader, so everything’s in one place. It came up with tabbed browsing before everyone else did. Good for laptops.

    Opera allows you to add customized buttons. Someone made a “Share this on Facebook” button and I put that in Opera’s toolbar. If I’m reading something and I think some of my mates would be interested, I share it on Facebook using that button, because Facebook’s where my friends are. I tend not to share wider than that.

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