Email Newsletters vs RSS Feeds – Which Do You Prefer?
Lately I’ve become a huge fan of my Google Reader! Now for some of you who are blog savvy, this post is going to sound a little elementary, but for the rest of you who like me are fairly new to the blogging world, you may just find it revolutionary.
When the wonderful designer of this blog site Jeremy Poradek asked me for requirements for this site, some of my more savvy friends (my brother and my husband) informed me that an RSS feed was a must. What is an RSS feedyou ask? Well, if you click on the preceding link, you’ll get the Wikipedia definition (which I highly recommend you check out), but the acronym itself means (as my friend Cindy Wingo informed me) “Really Simple Syndication.” I love that acronym because “Really Simple” are two words we don’t often associate with our computer these days.
What RSS feeds have allowed me to do is add my favorite blogs and news sites to my Google Reader where I can check out updates to the information sources all in one convenient place. No more sifting through dozens of email newsletters, I can just subscribe to the RSS feed for my favorite sites and there they are each day on my Google Reader with the new posts that I haven’t read yet in bolded text. Click on the thumbnail below to see what my Google Reader page looks like.
Some of you have asked me how I manage to answer so many questions on LinkedIn – it’s my Google Reader and the lovely RSS subscriptions for each of my favorite LinkedIn Answers categories. I can quickly scan the new questions that are bolded and if there is a good one for me to answer, I can just click on the question and I’m now on that question page on the LinkedIn site (click on thumbnail below to see a LinkedIn answer page).
So, for those of you who don’t have a reader (there are several others besides Google), consider getting one so that you will know immediately when I add a new post to Arrow-Tips. And for those of you sending out e-mail newsletters, consider moving to a blog with an RSS feed – I know a great designer!
Great idea Misty. I am going to call Jeramy on Monday.