How do you get your news? Newspaper? Magazine? TV? Or are you a “new media” person? Getting your news from blogs? YouTube subscription? Facebook? LinkedIn? Twitter? Electronic newsletter?
I’m a “new media” person. Newspaper? Cancelled long ago. Magazine? Electronic version only, please. TV? That’s for sports and science fiction shows.
I use all the new media mentioned above – I am especially partial to blogs of course. But there’s one other old new media technique I use every day – RSS. With RSS I don’t have to visit blog sites, news pages, and websites every day. RSS gathers them for me.
Here’s how to use RSS:
Look for one of these or similar symbols:
You might find them on the webpage you’re on, like the PROFIblog page:
Or you might find them in Internet Explorer’s command bar or Firefox’ menu bar.
Click on the symbol and you’ll get the RSS page. I copy the URL and import in into my RSS Application, RSSOwl. (It’s free and you can get it here.)
Here is my list of RSS feeds. You can import it into RSSOwl or the reader of your choice. Feel free to use it, delete feeds, add feeds, whatever. If you have suggestions for other RSS feeds, please share them in the comments.
Here are links to my news sources (and recommended for you):
MinutePROFINET YouTube subscription
LinkedIn PROFIBUS and PROFINET
Electronic newsletters (choose the newsletters at each site that interest you):
Automation World (newsletters at bottom of page)
Really geeky Twitter hack: are you following so many Twitterers that you can’t track those that really interest you? Here’s how to convert a single Twitter feed (like mine, for example) into RSS: How to Geek.
If you don’t have time for all of these suggestions, here’s the easy way: follow me on Twitter. I scour the RSS feeds and Twitter and all the others, then tweet just the ones that should be of interest to you. Two original tweets every weekday. They get repeated later in the day with the prefix #ICYMI (In Case You Missed It) because tweets are ephemeral – they disappear quickly from folks’ Twitter feeds.
–Carl Henning