How’s that for a title?
One amazing tool that many folks don’t know about or understand is called an RSS feed. My blog has one. My company has one. And I’ve even set one up to feed the most current news in land development, with an obvious focus on the southeast and, in particular, the southeast. (See “What Taylor’s Reading” on the right side of the page – more on that in a moment.) But what is it?
First, let’s define the acronym. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. In order to do anything with an RSS feed, you need an RSS reader. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of RSS readers. If you mouse over the “subscribe” button on the right, you’ll see many of the most popular readers.
But why use an RSS feed?
Most importantly, it saves you time like you’d never believe. I am able to read the AJC, New York Times, nearly every Business Chronicle in the United States, the Wall Street Journal, several blogs and other smaller newspapers with about a 15-20 minute investment each day. And the best part of all of that is that I never miss an article.
How is that possible?
The RSS reader loads every article for you automatically. There is no wasted time visiting dozens (hundreds?) of websites. You don’t have to figure out what’s been posted since you last visited. You don’t have to click through categories to find what you want to read.
What do I use?
I use Google Reader because of its super clean interface and ease of use. Here is an article and short video on how to use Google Reader.
With that part out of the way, here’s another reason to use an RSS reader – my reading list on the right side of this page titled “What Taylor’s Reading”. If you’re stubborn and don’t want to utilize an RSS reader, you can still take advantage of my reading list. However, you’ll only get the six most current articles that I’ve highlighted. As I said earlier, I read dozens of sources. Those sources produce around 500+ articles a day. I sift through those sources and share the most pertinent and interesting articles in my reading list. Those articles deal entirely with land development (of all sorts…) and, to a lesser extent, the economy. And, for the most part, I only highlight economic articles that I see as having an impact on the land development industry. No, you won’t find out that XYZ Corporation just laid off 130,000 employees – there’s plenty of that places elsewhere you can subscribe to. But it will let you know what economists think of the economic stimulus package. Basically, if you’re in the land development industry (especially in the southeast and Atlanta), my reading list feed will save you an incredible amount of time and get you up to date on what’s happening in our industry from multiple sources.
So, go find an RSS reader and subscribe to, at a minimum, these three feeds:
- http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/04260202489058141178/state/com.google/broadcast
- http://feeds.feedburner.com/tayloranderson
- http://feeds.feedburner.com/bluelandworksllc
Those three feeds, in order, are “What Taylor’s Reading”, this blog, Blue Landworks (my company) News.
I promise that if you’re wasting time surfing to multiple news websites every day, this will add several minutes (hours?) back to your day. Give it a try for a week. Then, leave a comment here and let me know how it’s going.
