January Edition

Note from the Editor: The January issue of SpinCycle focuses on ways to sort through the oceans of information available on the net, and gather the breaking news, growing buzz, and industry intelligence you need.

With so many sites writing so many things, it is certainly easy to get swamped. Einstein famously noted that, no matter how much you have, "Information is not knowledge." T. S. Elliot concluded that thought by asking, "Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

This month's edition aims to help you find, manage and consume all the right information by using user-driven social content sites, RSS, and news alerts.

If only Elliot had access to tools like these, he wouldn't have had to be so melodramatic.

Chris Hamilton - Should you Digg? Bite into Delicious? Both?

Two sites you should check on a daily basis are: Digg and Del.icio.us. They will help you keep up with new topics and products causing a buzz before they hit mainstream news outlets.

Under optimal conditions they can also be helpful tools to generate traffic to a client's Web site or a story about a client.

Digg is a user-driven social content Web site.

On the site people can post news stories, press releases, or Web sites that they find interesting. When other Digg users come across the story, they can vote on whether they feel they story is interesting or important by clicking the "digg it" button.

As a story gets more and more "diggs," it moves towards the top of the list, making it available to more and more people to view.

On the site there are separate and distinct categories like "Technology" or "World and Business", in addition to an all-encompassing section called "AllTopics". Digg also allows users to post comments on the various stories, releases or Web sites.

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site that is also user driven.

This site lets you can share your favorites (i.e. bookmarked) Web sites with others. You can use tags to help organize these bookmarks and find other interesting sites that people with similar interest have already bookmarked.

For users with interests related to your clients, this is a great way to have word spread about them and their site.

Del.icio.us can be used to collect and organize bookmarks that relate to an entire industry. For example, we use del.icio.us to collect links to articles related to HitTail that can be accessed by anyone at Connors. You can also find other people who are also interested in SEO-related topics.

Using both of these sites can help get our clients get more exposure online. Del.icio.us can help you link the company, product and Web site to related subjects. Digg can help bypass major media outlets and put an interesting story, product or service in front of millions of readers.

Also check out similar sites like StumbleUpon and Reddit.

Like I said above, check both regularly for news related to your clients, and to keep up with the industry, and know what's getting buzz—you never know when you'll catch sight of the next big thing.

Walter Fowler - RSS, XML, PR, and other helpful acronyms

Using RSS feeds as a way to gather information is an easy and efficient way to sift through the news, and, according to a recent study by Jupiter Research, at least 75 million consumers and businesspeople in the USA and UK use them on a regular basis.

With the mountains of content to keep track of nowadays, RSS has rapidly become essential.

CNET explains, "The number of sites and people producing content has grown over the years to an unmanageable size. Fortunately, you can now separate the signal from the noise with subscriptions to sites you enjoy and with newsreaders that can filter only the important news you need to get ahead at work."

What exactly is RSS and how do you use it? Good questions.

RSS files are a simple list of items containing short summaries of a Web page's content that is designed to alert users when there have been changes made to their favorite news sites, blogs, etc.

To monitor these RSS feeds you use a "feed reader" or "aggregator."

There are plenty of feed readers to choose from to help you organize and manage all of the information for which you have subscribed.

Popular feed readers include: Awasu, FeedReader, Newz Crawler, RSS Bandit, and the current favorite of several Connors employees, Net Vibes.

There are also aggregator features that are built into portal sites such as My Yahoo!, Google, and a handful of modern web browsers, and e-mail programs

RSS feeds will help you scan dozens of news sources quickly and stay on top of a wide range of topics. By viewing the headlines and summaries from your aggregator, you can avoid irrelevant stories and click on hyperlinks to the articles of most interest.

It's that simple—just choose a feed reader and start clicking away on those little orange buttons located on your favorite Web destinations.

Gina Bolotinsky – The Value of E-mail News Alerts

As PR people, we must absorb all news that is remotely relevant to our clients and their industries. In the days before the Internet took over the world, we used to scan the newspapers and hire expensive clipping services to get weekly reports. These days, technology is making our lives easier with Google, Magenta, and Factiva alerts.

Signing up is a breeze. For example, you can sign up for Google Alerts here. Magenta and Factiva alerts can be set up from your current personal accounts.

Though easier than reading every newspaper front to back, if you aren't diligent these alerts will pile up in your inbox. Also, Google alerts are notorious for arriving in seemingly nonsensical bursts and at different times than for other people signed up for the same alert.

If you are like me, and pride yourself on keeping your inbox organized, you can count on alerts that have gone unread, or contain unrelated information to irritate, especially, after long weekends away or vacations.

For the most part, the Factiva and Magenta alerts are helpful. They save you time because scanning your inbox, which you would do anyway, is essentially as good as going to the Magenta or Factiva sites and searching on your key words.

Google alerts, though they arrive randomly, were mostly reliable until Google added blog alerts to its news alerts. This means that Google scans the blogosphere and sends you an alert every time it detects your key word mentioned in a blog. As we now must monitor the world of blogs, these alerts have become a necessary evil because among them are the false alerts, redirecting you to Web sites which are, in essence, spam.

However, I believe in Google and am sure that amidst their employees eating for free in their company cafeteria, they will eventually work out the kinks and only supply alerts for valuable blogs and articles.

So, keeping our pre-Internet practices in mind, these alerts are a necessary and almost welcomed part of our day. In the meantime, keep waiting for the alert announcing the arrival of that one article you knew would be published someday.

Trust Me on This - Ben Hawken

Recreational Activities Have Not Always Been This Relaxing

There were days, long ago, when any leisurely activity or pastime required a tremendous amount of work.

Anything involving reading, watching television or movies, friendly correspondence, or gaming were done only after considerable effort.

Not only were reading options—at any instant—terribly limited, absolutely zero of them involved the Internet and its legions of hilarious blogs. These options were not only terribly limited, they were restricted exclusively to books. Sure, turning pages is a nice change of pace, but can you imagine not getting to break up the monotony by pointing and clicking?

Also, in days of yore, missing a TV show meant certain death and a lengthy wait for reruns. Now, with YouTube, network-hosted video content and TiVo, there is no need to rush home on Monday nights and watch another dreadful episode of Prison Break or American Idol.

Personal communication has also been revolutionized. Many of our parents can still recall the time when a message could only be sent using the U.S. Postal Service (yes, the USPS does other things that deliver Amazon.com orders). This process typically took several days and the use of "LOL", ":)" or "btw" were unheard of. The use of such phraseology would have confused the recipient and/or led them to believe you were speaking in some illicit Soviet code.

Games are, of course, an obvious addition to this list. In years past, extraneous items such as dice, colorful faux money and tin cans linked together with twine were the essential pieces of popular social entertainment amongst both children and adults. In those days "Play Stations" made less sense than space stations, "social networks" involved being social and networking, and "DVD" seemed like an acronym for a terrible illness.

Not only are there more things and better things to do (did I mention hilarious blogs?), we also have the power to keep track of all that. Thanks to Chris, Walt and Gina we are all now amateur experts on this subject.

So, instead of constantly scouring the Web for what you want, you can set your mind to important things. Like figuring out what "DVD" might have stood for.