One of the things I love about Dina Lynch is that she's always referring to something interesting that she read or heard about. She really keeps her ear to the ground and fulfills what Andrea Lee wrote about in the Multiple Streams of Coaching Income chapter, "Excuse me, can you be my Google?" She does it for her membership site for mediators, and now she's doing it on her brand new blogsite for boomer-aged couples.
I try to keep up with the news, I really do. I LOVE to read and can get lost for hours if I let myself. Which I rarely do, but that's another issue.
The reason it would take hours is because of the sad state of my Inbox. You see, it's flooded every week with the daily, weekly and monthly newsletters that I subscribe to AND email alerts from Feedblitz or Feedburner that tell me when the bloggers I'm watching have posted something new. Sadly, I end up overwhelmed and often don't read any of it.
Now, I've known about RSS readers for awhile. I've had a Bloglines account for ages, I just never used it. For whatever reason, it just didn't work for me. At a recent PWAC seminar about new media tools, I was inspired to give RSS another try.
Some research at the SEOmoz site led me to BlogBridge. I'm still in the process of subscribing to my favourite blogs, but so far I am REALLY enjoying my new feed reader AND I'm already using it quite a bit.
I'm also UNsubscribing to several email newsletters, if the author has a blog or if I'm simply ready to let them go. Why stay subscribed if I'm not reading them anyway?
My experience with Bloglines and BlogBridge reminds me that as amazing, cool and seductive these tools can be, they're only useful if we use them!