My feed reader takes the RSS feeds that I subscribe to and keeps track of when something new is posted to that blog, wiki, discussion forum or website. Instead of having to visit each of these sites, I rely on Bloglines to keep track of that for me. I can go to one place on the web, browse through my list of subscriptions and make a choice on whether or not I want to see what’s new. I almost never have time to review all the new items in one sitting. I can quickly run through my list, select the ones that are most important at that time and read the headlines. There are certain subscriptions that I look at every day, sometimes more than once. But sometimes the number of new items grows until it looks even too large for me to look at; its too overwhelming. Then I simply clear them out and let the aggregator start over at 1. If I missed something I can always go back to the inital website and look for it. For example: I subscribed to several blogs that aggregate posts from other blogs on a similar topic. This syndicated blog might post twenty new items every day. If I miss one day of looking at the new posts then the number quickly adds up. Most often, out of the twenty posts there might be only one post that is actually meaningful to me. When the number grows too big I know I will never look at all of them so its just easier to clear it out. Its almost like all those boxes that I have in storage. There are things that have been there for about two years. Most likely I could just give the box away. I probably wouldn’t miss anything. And what a feeling of freedom that would be! (not too save a $$ savings!)

Also available is something called RSS-narrator, like TalkingNews which takes your text-only feeds and converts them to podcasts so you can listen to the articles on your ipod or other mp3 player. I haven’t tried this out but it seems like a pretty handy thing to have especially if you had a long commute to make each day.

For more information on RSS and Aggregators check out commoncraft.com for an easy to understand explantion on RSS.

List of Aggregators on Wikipedia

Comparision of Aggregators on Wikipedia

What’s your favorite digital tool that you give thanks for?

Chocolate Pie Chart Image taken from: http://www.maryandmatt.net/store/cpc.html

This widget is called Feedjit. With Feedjit you can see:

• Which city and country your visitors are in
• Which website they arrived from, if any
• Which page they visited on your website
• Which external link they clicked to leave your site, if any

It gives you to option of using a live traffic feed or a live traffic map. If you use blogger or typepad you can quickly add it to your sidebar. If you are using another platform, Feedjit says:

If you use a different platform or if you’re installing Feedjit in a website, then simply cut and paste the script we provide into your blog template or website HTML. Feedjit will appear in the position you paste the script.

They also say that if you’re using a free account from wordpress.com then you won’t be able to use feedjit. If you have your own installation of wordpress you can modify your template with their code and add it to your site.

If your visitors don’t want to be seen there is an option link that they can click and remove themselves from your list.

Here’s what it looks like on my personal blog:

When I’m researching a topic I usually start with a search in a search engine and begin to gather websites that contain interesting and relevant content. I open links as I find them in new tabs in my browser. At some point I get overwhelmed by the number of tabs or I find a sufficient amount of information that I’m looking for and then I start to sift through it. Most often I find myself spending way too much time on it and decide to move on to another task before completing my research. I don’t really want to muddle up my bookmarks with links to these open tabs since I probably won’t need them more than once or twice. I could move them to my delicious.com social bookmarking account but once, again, they aren’t necessarily topics that I want to keep and the links may not have relevance to others who are following my newly added delicious feeds. I may not have had time to determine if they are really good resources and want to be reminded to look back at them. I also don’t want to spend too much time finding these links again as I probably want to get back to the topic within a day or two.

This is where” toread+” comes in. Like I mentioned before, I have it showing as a link on my toolbar so while I’m on a web page that I want to be reminded of I can click the link and I can send myself an email that has the web address listed in it. I also have the capability to add a short comment about the link so I can customize the email’s subject line.

This also works well for me when I’m in a meeting/conference/class/presentation and someone mentions a web address that I want to get back to when I have more time to spend on it. I can send myself an email reminder and then determine how important it is to me to keep at a later time. I normally don’t keep one of these emails in my inbox more than a day or so. I find time to determine the webpage’s importance and then move on and delete it or give it permanent home in one of my other social tools.

For me, using email to manage things like this has been working well. I know that some people prefer not to fill up their inbox with a lot of messages so this tool might not appeal to them. I’m able to keep a pretty clean inbox and archive (or trash) most of my incoming mail, move tasks to a todo list (I use todoist), send bookmarks to delicious, or categorize my messages.

For more information look at: http://toread.cc/howtouse.php

There’s also a tool called Read it Later - I haven’t tried it yet but I’m thinking about installing it and seeing if it has more features that work with my work style. In fact, I found several references to it yesterday and used my toread+ tool to send myself a couple of links as email reminders!