I’ve been using an RSS reader for about 2 years. It’s the only way I’m able to keep up with all of the information that I need to read to do my job well.

However, over the last month I had begun to feel overwhelmed and often was unable to keep up with my feeds. This was very concerning to me, because the company I co-founded mSpoke has created a tool called FeedHub to eliminate RSS information overload.

After reflecting on it, what I came to appreciate was that my information consumption needs had evolved and I hadn’t adjusted my feed management to evolve with them. To be more specific, two things had change:

1. While I’ve always traveled a lot, in the last 3 months this has amplified significantly. I feel like I’ve spent more time in an airplane than on the ground.


2. My interests have become slightly more diverse in terms of the feeds I’m reading.

First Change: Switching to Suite of NewsGator RSS Readers

I’ve pretty much always used a web based reader, because I like the feel of them. Over time I’ve switched back and forth between Google Reader, Bloglines and NewsGator Online. With my new travel schedule I’d like to be able to keep up with my feeds in the air (no wifi) and even Google Gears + Google Reader doesn’t seem to really support this use case well.

Therefore, I’ve switched to using the suite of RSS Readers from NewsGator and am depending much more on NetNewsWire so that I can say informed when I’m flying effectively and then just synch back up when I hit the ground and go back to NewsGator Online.

(We do have a strategic partnership with NewsGator, but our focus is primarily on their Widget Offerings.)

Second Change: Divide and Conquer Feed Sources

I’ve been segmenting my feeds into two buckets for quite sometime: those I read every item published and those I want FeedHub to filter for me when I can’t keep up with them. However, based on the increasing diversity of my feeds I really decided that I needed to break each of these down into multiple folders.

For the ‘read all the items’ feeds, I’ve created the following folders:

• mSpoke Vanity Searches
• Sean Ammirati Vanity Searches
• Family / Close Friends
• mSpoke Employee Blogs
• Work Related Content - Must Read
• Partners & Competitors

For the ‘vanity searches’, I use a combination of Twitter Search, Ice Rocket and Technorati to make sure I’m reading all of the content written about me or mSpoke. The rest of these are pretty self explanatory and total about 25 sources.

For the sources that FeedHub is filtering for me, I’ve broken those into 5 categories as well and create 5 personalized feeds in FeedHub. Those categories are:

• Market Analysis
• Entrepreneurship
• VC Blogs
• Online Advertising
• Gadgets

This is a very common FeedHub use-case and one we even highlighted when launching FeedHub over a year ago. However, personally I’ve always felt one large personalized feed worked better for me. I think this was true, but with my content interests diversifying it had become less effective. The reason is that some of these subjects I’d like more / less content on everyday and one of them (Gadgets) I frankly can just let accrue content until the weekend.

Anyway, that is how I’m now managing my RSS Reading. I’d love to hear your approaches in the comments below.

A few months ago, I went to Grove City College (my alma matter) to talk to a group of about 50 computer science students during an ACM meeting. I offered some brief remarks about what I did for a living (very brief.) Then we had a really interesting hour plus interactive discussion where I instigated some of the early topics by throwing out some themes I thought would be interesting.

We talked for quite some time about how social media was changing the job applicant process. While I was more focused on the positive things they could do, I also mentioned they need to pay attention to what stupid negative things they could be doing online.

One specific thing I encouraged them not to do was put pictures or other media on their Facebook or other social network profile pages that are in anyway unprofessional. (Note: I wasn’t implying it should all be professional, but at least keep in mind professional contacts will be looking at it.)

Today, Nick ONeill’s excellent All Facebook blog published a report from NPR on a survey Career Builder just released which states:

one in five employers check Facebook profiles when researching a potential job candidate. Additionally, one third of those that checked Facebook found a reason to reject an applicant due to photos with alcohol or drugs.

(Here is the link to the NPR audio)

If you aren’t conscious of your online brand — now is the time to start regardless of what phase of life you’re in.