We all want to keep up with the latest news and trends in our industry along with learning more about other areas of interest, like our hobbies. With only so many hours in the day, people often struggle with finding the information they need to be successful while not spending too much time sorting through massive quantities of data. Here are a few tips to help you whittle the information down from a fire hose to a trickle of only the most relevant content.

RSS Readers

If you don’t already use an RSS reader, you should find one, since this is the best way to get only the information that you want pushed to you while being able to easily see which posts you have read and which you have not. Google Reader and Netvibes are good places to start. For the rest of you who already use RSS, there are many ways to make it more effective.

Firstly, change the way you think about RSS; it’s more like a newspaper than email. If you fall behind on the daily newspaper, you aren’t going to keep trying to catch up and read papers that are months old. RSS is just like a newspaper, so don’t worry if you don’t get to everything, and don’t feel like you need to catch up. Right now, I have thousands of unread items in Google Reader, but I am OK with it. If that big number of unread items bothers you, simply take advantage of the “mark all as read” feature once a week if it makes you feel better or, better yet, use an RSS readers that lets you hide the number of unread items.

Secondly, do some pruning and get rid of the dead wood. Spend a couple of hours looking at which feeds give you the most value and get rid of the rest. If you are feeling overwhelmed and overloaded, you are probably oversubscribed. Some RSS readers even have tools to help you find feeds that you rarely read or are rarely updated.

Third, spend as little time as possible in your RSS reader by prioritizing your feeds. I use folders in Google Reader to group my feeds, and I put the most critical feeds right at the top. I make sure that I read through those high priority feeds first to spend more time on what I need to know while hopefully having some time left over to read a little extra. I also encourage you to learn the keyboard shortcuts for your RSS reader, since this can shorten your RSS reading time.

News Aggregation

While RSS readers are great for the things you know you want to read, they are not the best way to find new sources of information or news from unexpected sources; this is where news aggregators really excel. My favorite aggregator is Twitter Tim.es, since it takes the links from the people that I follow on Twitter and displays them in newspaper-like format, with the links that have been posted by more of my friends appearing as headlines on my Twitter Tim.es page. I also use Techmeme to find the topics that people are discussing online. Depending on your interests, you might be able to find other news aggregation sources focused on your areas of expertise.

Filtering

Filtering RSS feeds takes a little work, but it is worth it in the long run if it helps you find only the information on the topics that you want to see. While there are many filtering tools, my tool of choice is Yahoo Pipes. I use Yahoo Pipes to find out when people are talking about me or the topics that I am most interested in. For example, I have Pipes that comb through industry analyst feeds looking for a few specific keywords, which allows me to find the reports from analysts on those topics while ignoring the rest.

The best thing you can do to avoid overload is to stay focused on the most important information while not worrying about what you might be missing. If you can become more efficient at finding and consuming the right information for your needs, you can easily stay informed while minimizing the feeling of being overwhelmed. Read what you can and don’t stress about what you don’t have time to read.

What are your tips for managing content information overload?

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Photo by Flickr user See-ming Lee 李思明 SML, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license

2.0

When I talk about monitoring “dashboards,” I use the term very loosely. In some cases, I set clients up with RSS readers that have a typical dashboard look and feel for monitoring feeds, while in other cases the “dashboard” is really a monitoring section in an existing RSS reader with the feeds delivered as an OPML file.

In my experience, people who are new to RSS readers tend to do better with a reader that looks more like a dashboard than the a tree or folder structure. This is particularly true for monitoring because a dashboard lets you see more information at a glance. Netvibes and iGoogle are both good choices for new users. However, I think that the Netvibes layout tends to work slightly better for this purpose. Here’s an example of a monitoring dashboard built using Netvibes:

However, I personally use NetNewsWire for my RSS reader. I have my monitoring dashboards set up in folders that don’t in any way resemble a typical dashboard. Try out a few different readers to find the one that works best for your style and usage. The tool that you select isn’t the critical element. The real magic is in the content that you are monitoring.

I monitor three primary types of content in my dashboards: vanity mentions, competition and industry analysis.

Vanity mentions are the conversations that people are having about you, your company, your products and your employees. Keep a close eye on these mentions so you can respond quickly to questions and concerns. A proactive approach to monitoring and responding to discussions can help you avoid potential issues before they get out of hand and can show people that you are responsive to your customers. I track vanity mentions for companies that I am involved with across Twitter, blog searches, Flickr, various video sites, FriendFeed and more.

You can get interesting insights about your competition and their activities by proactively monitoring their communications and what other people say about them online. I often monitor competitors blogs, press releases, support forums, job postings and personal blogs or social media accounts of key employees, in addition to monitoring mentions of the competition on various sources.

Industry analysis should also be part of your monitoring dashboard. Monitor blogs written by thought leaders within your industry along with tracking for mentions of keywords that are important to your organization or your interests. I often use this section of the monitoring dashboard as a way to find content for blog posts. It can be a great way to see what other people are talking about in your industry and give you an opportunity to respond to, disagree with or build on interesting ideas from other people.

In addition to the dashboard technology, I use tools like Yahoo Pipes and PostRank to help me find relevant content and filter it down to the pieces that are the most important for my purposes. If you have never used Yahoo Pipes, I have several two-minute Yahoo Pipes video demos that can help you learn what you need to get started.

How do you monitor online conversations? What kind of monitoring dashboards do you use?

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Interesting conversations are happening all over the web, on blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed and many other sites. People are talking about you, your company and your industry, and revealing many tips and tricks that you should know. I am a self-confessed data junkie, so I have a few tips to help you make sense of the massive amounts of data available and to focus on monitoring just what really matters.

Use a Dashboard

An RSS-based monitoring dashboard is a great way to collect everything you’re monitoring into one place. I’ve set these up for clients in a number of different ways depending on the preference of the person responsible for monitoring. For people new to RSS, I generally encourage them to use something like Netvibes, which has a visual layout with multiple tabs and columns where you can see several key conversations at a glance. I have a couple of sections in my RSS reader where I keep everything that I’m monitoring, and I make sure that they are the first things I read.

Filter Your Feeds

Filtering RSS feeds through Yahoo Pipes or other tools is a good way to make sure that your monitoring dashboard contains relevant content and not just a list of blogs to read. I use Yahoo Pipes to filter for mentions of my name, my company and efforts that I am involved with across various sites (Twitter, FriendFeed, blogs, Flickr, video sites, etc.) Yahoo Pipes can also be used to combine many feeds and filter those high-volume RSS feeds for only relevant content that you need to know. Tools like PostRank are a good way to find the posts within a feed that are generating the most buzz.

Choose the Right Twitter Client

Use a smart Twitter client that lets you group the important people that you want to monitor and provides a way to get real-time notifications for mentions of certain keywords. TweetDeck is a good choice. I have a couple of different groups set up to help make sure that I see the posts from people who have important ideas and who provide me with the greatest value. I also have keyword searches in TweetDeck for companies or events that I am involved with to make sure that I don’t miss any important conversations about these efforts on Twitter.

Find Hot Topics With FriendFeed

FriendFeed is a great way to find the hot topics of the day, to make sure that you’re keeping up with industry trends and new tools or techniques that you can apply to your work. I like to group people by topic, like community management, and use the “best of” feature to find the best posts of the day, week or month from those subgroups of people. The example below shows the best post of the month from my “News Makers” group. It’s an easy way for me to filter the flood of content in FriendFeed down to something much more manageable.

FriendFeed Best of Month

While monitoring is important, you should also be responding to these conversations. People are more likely to engage with you in future if they get a response back, rather than feeling like their feedback went into a black hole. Respond to as many @replies on Twitter as you can, and also use your blog for longer responses or to post reactions to relevant conversations that are happening across the web.

What are your tips and tricks for monitoring online conversations?

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I love information and wish I could spend more time reading and consuming it, to learn more about a variety of topics. However, the harsh reality is that there are only so many hours in the day that I can spend reading and learning. I could take the easy way out and just read less, but my goal is to become more efficient at finding the content that I want to read the most.

Pruning your feeds is a good way to start. Fellow WWD blogger Celine Roque wrote a great article about how to fine-tune your RSS subscriptions a few months ago. Dead feeds and feeds that you rarely read only slow down the process of finding the content that you really need. I have a tendency to add blogs to my reader based on one or two great posts, but sometimes those blogs just don’t keep my interest and must be pruned later. I try to go through my RSS reader a few times a year and focus on getting rid of, or de-prioritizing, feeds that add less value or aren’t being regularly updated any more. Some feed readers even have tools for finding those old blogs that aren’t being updated regularly (dinosaurs) and the blogs that currently get the least amount of your attention.

I also make extensive use of filtering to reduce the amount of content in my feeds. Yahoo Pipes is a great filtering tool, since you can use it to combine many RSS feeds and only display posts that match certain key words that are the most interesting to you. I use Yahoo Pipes to filter groups of blogs that typically have low relevancy for me but have occasional great nuggets of information that I don’t want to miss.  With Pipes, I can make sure that I only see the nuggets, and not the posts that contain less interesting topics.

Use an RSS reader that gives you a way to organize your feeds and use it as a way to prioritize the things that you should read more often. I use NetNewsWire, which gives me the ability to create folders and move them up or down the list. The things that I need to read every day are at the top, while the blogs that I read only occasionally are near the bottom.

When working with clients who don’t already use a reader, I usually set them up with Netvibes, which has more of a dashboard feel. In this case, I organize their feeds with the top priorities in the upper left, lower priorities in the lower right and multiple tabs to group topics. It doesn’t really matter how you organize the information as long as it helps you prioritize your reading.

Take the time to learn the keyboard shortcuts for your feed reader. I can get through the material more quickly when I use a few keys to navigate through the content. In my case, NetNewsWire lets you use arrow keys, the space bar and other keys to navigate through the content, mark items as read/unread, open in a browser, collapse/expand folders, and more. Navigating the menu items to find these functions can sometimes take more time than you realize.

It also helps me to think of feeds as a stream that flows through my RSS reader. I don’t try to catch up by reading everything, and I don’t worry about leaving unread items in my reader. I read what I can with the time I have available and don’t spend any time worrying about the rest. There will always be more interesting content than I can ever read in a lifetime.

What are your tips for getting through your RSS feeds more quickly and efficiently?

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I’m not even following a very large number of people, and yet if I add it up, mining my tweets takes up a fair amount of my time during the day. I considered doing as Aliza suggests, but that would also mean switching accounts to post under my main identity, or else using a program that supports multiple accounts at once.

Not willing to make the trade, I started looking around for alternative solutions. That’s when I found Twalala, a third party Twitter client that boasts improved control. Twalala allows you to filter your twitstream by keyword or phrase, and you can temporarily silence twitterers who might be getting on your nerves and/or spamming.

As you can see in the screen shot, next to the reply button in the upper right corner of every tweet displayed is another button which allows you to mute that individual. If you mute a user, all of their updates will no longer appear in your twitstream (the one displayed at Twalala.com, anyway).

You can also filter by specific keyword or phrase. This could be very useful if a topic starts to seriously trend on Twitter that you’re not particularly interested in. Plus, you can combine it with an exception keyword to make sure nothing professionally relevant escapes, even it happens to meet your exclusion criteria. For example, I might not want to see any tweets talking about Britney Spears, unless they’re also related to social media, so I could set “social media” or “blog”, etc. as my exception variable.

It’s a solution that works, so long as you’re ok with using a browser-based Twitter client. Don’t get me wrong, I like Twitter’s random nature. Everyone I follow, I follow for a reason. But there’s a time and place for everything, and Twalala is one way to help establish those limits.

How do you manage your professional Twitter use? Any tools, practices, applications, etc. to suggest?

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My favorite filtering techniques involve Yahoo Pipes, which looks and sounds much more complicated than it is. Jackson West described Yahoo Pipes pretty well when he called them “hard to grok, but snazzy“; however, Yahoo Pipes doesn’t have to be quite so difficult for people to understand. The first time I looked at Pipes, the interface scared me away until a friend of mine gave me a very quick demo that showed how easy it was to use. After using Pipes for while, I gave similar demos to help other friends get started and even recorded a 2 minute introduction to Yahoo Pipes that shows how to use Pipes to filter RSS feeds. How complicated could it be if I can explain it in a 2 minute screencast?

Here are a few of my favorite filtering techniques that I use to find the most relevant content.

Filter high volume feeds. Many of the big technology news blogs have a huge volume of stories in the feed. The aggregated feed for the entire GigaOM network, for example, contains dozens of posts every day. I have a hard time finding the content relevant to me when I have to sort through a large number of posts, so I use Pipes to search these stories to find the ones that matter to me. The example pipe below shows how to filter the entire GigaOM network feed down to the few posts containing certain keywords.

Example: Filtering high volume feeds

Aggregate and filter less relevant content. There are certain categories of blogs that have outstanding content, but they rarely publish posts that I want to read. For me, this is true of industry analyst blogs. While I really want to hear about the latest research in online communities and social media, most of the reports published are on topics that are not interesting to me. The Pipe below is one that I use to aggregate 17 industry analyst blogs together into one feed while filtering the posts for a few keywords relevant to my interests.

Example: Analyst research blogs filtered for social media

Find the posts everyone else is reading. For news junkies like me, it helps to be able to find the posts that are generating the most buzz. PostRank, a service that used to be called AideRSS, simplifies this process by finding the most talked about posts from any RSS feed. I often use PostRank in conjunction with Pipes to rank and filter posts at the same time. The example below ranks the posts here on WebWorkerDaily with a feed containing only the posts that are generating the most conversation.

Example: PostRank for WebWorkerDaily and feed for the top posts

WebWorkerDaily PostRank

Both Yahoo Pipes and PostRank have an option to get the output as RSS, so I make sure that the results from these tools make it into my RSS reader. With these more efficient filtered feeds, I can remove some of the aggregated and filtered source feeds from my reader. By using these filtering techniques to further prune my feeds, I plan to spend less time catching up on feed reading and more time working, exercising, or spending time with friends and family.

What are your favorite filtering techniques?

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