RSS Genius!

I’m obsessed. Obsessed. RSS feeds might possibly be my favorite social media tool that I have discovered thus far. Don’t tell my professors… but lately I’ve been spending more time reading my RSS feed than I have doing school work! RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (Wiki told me that) and it is genius. At its’ basic form, it allows you to pull in all types of blogs and articles which interest you and puts it in one place. For me, it’s been a huge asset as I try to gain as much knowledge about the social media and marketing worlds as possible.

I use the Google Reader. Why? Well basically I love Google … it’s easy , I’m loyal and in the same place as every other Google tool that I use. It links to my Gmail account and brings in all of my gchat friends so that I can share articles with them as well. Even though I prefer Google, there are many forms of RSS feeds that you could use ranging from online versions to putting the software on your hard drive. The most popular RSS readers are My Yahoo, Bloglines and of course Google Reader.

There are a variety of ways to read the blogs. Subscriptions are publications from journalistic resources where as blogs are informal postings. For example, I am currently following subscriptions from Advertising Advantage and the New York Times Media and Advertising section and blogs created by my friends. Following blogs is super simple to do: just click on the orange icon that says RSS feed on any blog or news article (in fact if you want to follow my blog, just go to the bottom right hand side of the screen… you’ll see it). If you were to see my RSS feed, I have 3 articles unread from the NYT. If I want to read just the NYT articles I can click on just that publication. If I would prefer to just see all of my postings I click on “All Items” and it will show me an expanded view of all postings. Super easy right! Then say I find an article interesting, I can click the “share” icon at the bottom and share the article will all that follow my blog (my gchat friends… see how this works)! You can also just go directly to my shared page by going here or you can find it from my Google profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/danielle.gossett. Personally, I think it’s genius and a fantastic way for me to read the daily news on marketing and social media!