Collaboration Tools Part 2: Reading the News

Author’s Note: This writeup is the second in a short series investigating different types of online collaboration tools that you can use to help your organization grow and learn. Click here to browse the entire “Collaboration Tools” series.

Keeping up with the tubes
I read an awful lot of news online. I don’t have a newspaper sub or cable TV anymore, so I’m not necessarily more informed than the rest of the world, but I *do* read a lot of news online. I really enjoy the medium for its interactivity. Reading online lets me spend as much or as little time as I want on any given story. Reading online lets me focus on topics that interest me, rather than topics that interest the people in the newsroom at a newspaper or TV station. The biggest problem I have is managing the endless flow of news coming at me. Below are a few suggestions.

Google Reader

1. Get a news reader
RSS or Really Simple Syndication is a way to make updates from your favorite online information sources come to you rather than having to go looking for them every day. I use Google Reader

to track updates from 50 different sites every time they publish something new. I tend to use this for places with a very high signal to noise ratio such as the photo galleries and blogs (or Twitter feeds) of friends and family members or blogs on topics that I am especially interested in. Whenever I am on a site I find interesting I will look for the icon somewhere on the page and click that to add the link to Google Reader. The next time the target site is updated Google will know about it and I will have the update ready for me the next time I fire up Reader.

Other popular news readers: Bloglines

2. Set up a “wall of news”
Big news sites (I like ESPN.com for instance) put out tens and hundreds of new items in a day so I can’t hope to keep up with every single story in my newsreader. Rather than trying to tame that torrent of information, I just set up a news wall on iGoogle. iGoogle allows you to set up a grid of smaller items – syndicate disparate news updates or other widgets such as weather maps or fortune cookie toys. Seeing the newest 10 stories on Slashdot.org is more appealing to me than actually trying to read every single thing they publish.

Other popular news walls: Netvibes, My Yahoo!

iGoogle as “news wall”

3. Set up a news-monitoring alert
I use Google Alerts for this one. Type in any search term and have articles and blog entries on the topic emailed to you in digest format every day or week. Some people set up Google Alerts on their own names or their acquaintances, I am currently only running alerts on topics related to this blog. This one can get repetitive as you start to see how many different news outlets will report on the same story in the month after it actually breaks.

4. Save bookmarks online for later sharing or further reading
I have lately started to use “social bookmarking” site del.icio.us in lieu of bookmarking anything within my browser. This allows me to “save” and easily categorize any web page I think I might want to refer to later. I have already gotten great mileage out of this one in terms of being able to access links I saw two weeks ago on another computer and now want to be able to recall. Examples: my “books to read” list and my “to show to my wife later” list. Del.icio.us is especially nice for sharing links amongst your friends. I can tag any link I save as “for:jes5199″ if I want my friend Jesse to see the link next time he logs in.

Where’s the collaborative value in RSS and news readers in general?
First and foremost I am able to stay up to date with the latest news and thought regarding the topics most interesting to me. Secondly I am able to rebroadcast the bits and pieces of information I pick up to people that I think will be interested in them. Sharing this information (generally using “Share this!” or “email to a friend!”) links helps me keep other people up to date on things that I am sure we will have a shared interest in.

When I post something to one of my public logs like this site or my Twitter feed, I know that certain people will see it. Similarly, I get the same regular updates from them. This isn’t exactly a synchronous collaboration, but the fact remains that all of this information is now public on the Web and it will stay there for quite some time. Best of all, interested people can find them six months later through a quick web search if the content I’m putting out is relevant to their search.

Even if you take nothing else from this article, I want you to try a news reader such as Google’s. It is an amazing boon to my online experience.

• Session Agenda: Open Learning Frameworks (slideshare.net)
• Talking RSS Reader Does Just What it Sounds Like [Downloads] (lifehacker.com)
• Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: The Real-Time Web (readwriteweb.com)