How can you keep yourself updated with everything new and relevant that gets published on the Web? What is the best to find always fresh, new content for your blog to write about?

Photo credit: Robin Good

In this short video Robin Good explains one of the key elements everyone wanting to become an online publisher has to confront with: how do you stay updated on the specific news that are relevant to your focus of interest without wasting hours to visit tens of sites or hundreds of RSS feeds?

Managing all the sources the Internet provides is not a simple task if you don't find an efficient way to filter all of these information and focus only on the ones that seem relevant to you.

This is why, Robin introduces to you his own approach to gathering, reading and picking up the most relevant daily news from hundreds of different sources, a task (newsmastering) and a new emerging professional role (the newsmaster), that according to him will be increasingly in demand.

In fact, Robin argues, it is next to impossible nowadays to have enough time to scour and scan all of the possible relevant news sources in a certain industry, and unless you start relying on intermediary human filters, what he calls "newsmasters", to aggregate, filter and hand-select the very best and most relevant news for your specific industry niche, you may as well give up on the idea of being on top of the news that are relevant to you.

Here's Robin own advice:

Intro by Daniele Bazzano

How To Keep Yourself Updated

Full English Text Transcription

Hi guys, this is Robin Good indeed!

More questions coming into my e-mail inbox from you asking about more stuff on video web publishing and everything it takes to become an effective online publisher.

This time you write me, or I have selected among your very many many questions: How do I keep myself updated on the topics I'm interested the most?

Great question indeed!

Today this is one of the challenges for anyone out there on the information frontier: how do you keep yourself updated? There's no lack of information sources out there, the problem is: how do you manage all that information without going crazy or being overwhelmed by this tsunami of news coming at you every minute?

Most of you already have identified some web sites, some sources, that are ideal for providing the news you're looking for. The best next step you can do after that is to subscribe to the RSS feed of those sites and collect all of those feeds inside an RSS reader.

What does that all mean?

It's very simple. You will notice, if you pay attention, that most web sites now have somewhere written in their navigation information. On the side, of the top right, or at the bottom: RSS feed. You can also see often a little icon that is an orange rectangle with some waves inside. It looks like kind of a speaker sending sounds, waves out.

That orange button stands for the URL, the address of the feed of that site. If you can copy, by right-clicking or ctrl-clicking if you're on a Mac, that logo you would get a URL that is behind that logo. Even if you click and you go to a page where you see a lot of code, grab the URL above. Don't worry about the code you see. Get the URL above and put it inside your RSS reader. One of those would be for example, Google Reader, free to use. You add your RSS feeds inside of it and you start reading in one place all of the many different sites that you're interested into.

But, maybe, I'm getting out of your specific question: how do I get myself updated?

I do all of that, but I do also something more. I feel that when I am looking at the news, I can do something valuable also for the others at the same time.

Because anytime I look at the news, there are some news that are very relevant for me. And since I've decided to help out, to communicate, to create a community of people that wants basically to do exactly what I'm doing everyday, that is finding out how to become a more effective online communicator, publisher, entrepreneur, I just share with my own readers, the contents and the news that I think are most valuable.

I call this activity newsmastering.

By selecting as many sources I think are relevant (I have about one hundred and ten of these), and everyday reading all of these sources and selecting out of them which are the most interesting for me and sharing them on my breaking news, on my homepage, the most valuable ones, allows me to do two great things:

1. Keep myself very update on what is happening.
2. Share absolutely for free with my readers, the very best news that I think they should be reading if they want to be as updated as I am.

Then, when you add your team, your newsroom doing this together with you, and you learning from them and them learning from you, that becomes a tremendously valuable approach to keeping yourself updated while creating valuable content for others.

I hope that answers your question! Look forward to more questions, send them in at Robin.Good[at]masternewmedia.org. Ciao!

Originally shot and recorded by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and first published on October 14th 2008 as "How To Keep Yourself Updated And Why The Role Of The Newsmaster Is So Important - Video".