Blog Topic Ideas - Live Feeds
This is a part of the Blog Topic Idea series.
This is something I have been using lately. It is not something ground breaking - but if you use the right tools, it can save you a lot of hassles wading through a lot of feeds in your feed reader.
You already will be having feeds to established blogs in your feed reader. But there will be a lot of blogs, and it can be a pain reading through all of them. Luckily for us, there are quite a lot of tools out there that can do most of the mechanical work for us.
Let me go by example of how I use this technique to generate topic ideas for my art blog, KalaaLog.com.
Among other things, “digital painting” is a key phrase that is very relevant to this blog. I go to Google Blog Search and Technorati search, and pop in this key phrase. They give me results, but what I am interested in is the feed to that result. If you are a bit less geeky than me, you can just use these feeds as it is.
But I went ahead and did a few more things with these feeds. I used the Yahoo Pipes to do some more of the mechanical works for me. I created a pipe, that took these feeds, aggregated them, filtered them for spammy words (you know them, don’t you?) and then sorted them by publish date. The result is not as glamorous as I want, but it is workable. I take the feed of the output of this pipe and use it in my choice of feedreader.
I just schedule a time of day as per my convenience and sift through them. By end of it, I have my head filled with topic ideas.
