This is the third post in a series of tips on how to generate higher quantities of content for your blog. Check out the previous posts at Set Targets, News Sites and Aggregators, Start a New Blog, Break Down Your Posts, Ecto and Recruit Writers.
Use News Aggregators (like Bloglines), News Services (like Google News, Daily Yahoo News or Topix) or other Blog tools (like Technorati) to follow subjects that you like to write about. The majority of posts on my commercial blogs are links to articles, blog posts and other sites around the web that write on the topics I’m interested in.
Using the above tools I generally know if someone has written something of interest about one of these topics in a newspaper or blog around the world pretty quickly after its been written and then its not too hard to link up to it with a few comments attached or maybe a quote from the relevant article. It’s great to be able to follow specific blogs of interest using News Aggregators or to be able to have more general alerts on specific keywords.
The great thing about some of the news services is that they are quite automated and will email you any relevant articles – what could be easier!
What tools do you use to find content for your blog?
i use a Yahoo tool called
Creative Commons Search BETA
http://search.yahoo.com/cc
I’ve been using the live bookmarks feature of FireFox to manage my feeds (with an occasional use of Sage).
I use bloglines now. Before, I tried out the Firefox plugin reader called “NewsFox”, but found it to be quite buggy. It’s taken me several years to get out of the computer-based applications mindset, and get into web-based stuff.
Finally on Bloglines and gmail, so like is a bit easier now.
Bill
Technorati is great. Especially the keyword searching (with associated RSS feeds).
Google Reader has really come of age. It’s one of the prime tools I now use.