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A Curated News Stream: My Google Reader Shared Items

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One of the primary benefits the social media cognoscenti put forward for the value of Twitter is the human-curated news stream. On Twitter you follow people you trust, know or who interest you for some reason. As they come across news, blog posts, YouTube videos or other items on the web that interest them they will tweet about them. If these are people you have chosen to follow, it is highly likely that the items they share will be of interest to you as well based on some shared interest or personal connection that led you to follow these people.

My own experience is that the human curated news feed I capture from the people I follow on Twitter is extremely valuable. This is probably the most consistent value I have captured from Twitter. A number of interesting and highly relevant items have come to my attention solely because somebody in my Twitter stream chose to share those news item.

There is another Internet tool that I find extremely valuable: Google Reader. I use Google Reader to track hundreds (yes hundreds) of RSS feeds for blogs, publications, search alerts from Google, Bing and activity on RSS-enabled social networks (sadly Facebook is not among them). I scan through well over 1,000 news items on a daily basis in a series of relatively painless quick sessions of 15 – 20 minutes max. So in under 1 hour each day I am exposed to over 1,000 unique news items in the domains of general news, telecommunications, strategy, competitive intelligence… the list goes on.

Several months ago the people at Google Reader added a “Share” function that allows people to share items of interest with their Google Reader social network. Your Google social network generally defaults to your fellow Gmail users you have added to your Google Chat contact list. Recently the Google Reader team have added tools that enable you to find fellow Google Reader users with shared interests and subscribe to their shared items.

I am a promiscuous sharer on Google Reader. How I structure my marathon review sessions to get through the large volume of news items that are in my Google Reader at any one time is that if there is an item that I find interesting I actually share it so that I will come back to it when I have more time to read it. My thinking is that if I find the item of interest it’s likely that the few dozen people following my shared items on Google Reader might also find it interesting.

My default cognitive model is to share (my own version of “publish, then filter”). If you are interested in the latest news about strategy, competitive intelligence, marketing, social media and knowledge management this is a well-curated stream of information. Not all of it may be of deep interest to you, but the odds are high that a large proportion of the material will be worth at least a momentary glance. I’ve featured the most recent shared items on the right-hand side of this blog page for some time now below my Twitter stream and above my Delicious bookmarks.

If you are a person that needs to cast a wide information net I highly recommend you consider creating your own Google Reader account. You don’t need to be quite the addict that I am, though I am confident you’ll find value from Google Reader. If you share an interest in the topics that I’ve mentioned in this blog entry (you’re reading this blog, so that is probably a “Yes”) you should follow me on Google Reader (I also want to follow you back). If you are using another RSS reader you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my shared items. If you are kicking it old school and still not ready to step up to RSS you can see the web page of my shared items from Google Reader.



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