How To Keep Yourself Updated and Why The Role of the Newsmaster Is So Important - Video
How can you keep yourself updated with everything new and relevant that gets published on the Web? What is the best way to always find fresh, new content for your blog to write about?
In this short video, Robin Good explains one of the key elements everyone wanting to become an online publisher has to confront: how do you stay updated on the specific news that is relevant to your focus of interest without wasting hours visiting 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 this 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 is relevant to you.
Here’s Robin's 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 to me, or I have selected among your many, many questions: How do I keep myself updated on the topics I’m interested in 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 websites, 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 websites now have somewhere written in their navigation information. On the side of the top right or at the bottom: RSS feed.
You can also often see a little icon that is an orange rectangle with some waves inside. It looks like a kind of speaker sending sounds and 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 in.
But maybe I’m getting out of your specific question: how do I get myself updated?
I do all of that, but I also do something more. I feel that when I am looking at the news, I can do something valuable also for 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 every day, 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 as I think are relevant (I have about one hundred and ten of these), and every day reading all of these sources and selecting those 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 updated 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 to 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”.
Robin Good
