6 Non-traditional Ways to Use RSS

Given the amount of electronic information people consume on a daily basis, it’s no wonder RSS feeds (“Really Simple Syndication”) have become a daily necessity for many of us. An RSS Feed’s most common task is subscribing to updates on a blog or news site. Which is no doubt unbelievably helpful, but there are lots of other ways to take advantage of RSS.

Before diving in, if you haven’t already, you should take a look at Google Reader (free) or another RSS aggregator service. My instructions will assume you’re using it.

1. Keep track of who’s linking to your site

1. Go to http://blogsearch.google.com/
2. Type in link:the URL of the site
   
3. Results will show you other pages that are linking to your site.
   
4. At the bottom of the page, click the “Subscribe to a blog search feed for…” link.

2. Keep track of Google Alerts without swamping yourself with email

1. Go to www.google.com/alerts/manage
2. Create a new alert and select “Feed” under the Deliver To option.
3. Click the RSS link, or the link that says View in Google Reader.

3. Get updates from Twitter

Say you’re interested in scanning for certain topics, but you want to see what people who may not have time to write a blog about it are saying. Maybe it’s your business, your product, your favorite sports team… Twitter offers a lot of value.

1. Go to www.search.twitter.com
2. Type in what you’re interested in.
   
3. Search and review results.
   
4. Right click the RSS feed button and copy the link location.
   
5. Go to Google Reader, click Add Subscription, and paste.
   
6. And you’re done. Now new results will populate in your Google Reader.
   

4. Keep track of job search queries

I really like using idealist.org. One of the nice features of using it is when you perform a search, there’s a “Get an RSS feed for this search” link. Save this feed and you can quickly find new job postings that satisfy your search filters.

5. Let others do the work for you with Delicious

I use Delicious to organize my bookmarks online, but it’s also a great way to let others do your research and tracking work for you. For instance, I like checking out new links about free online tools. So I search by tags (first “free) then filter further (with “tools). From here, there’s a link at the bottom of the page for “RSS feed for these bookmarks.” Add that into reader and whenever a new link is tagged with those specifications, it’ll show up in your Reader.

6. Follow changes to any website

Google’s now added a feature that lets you subscribe to a page, whether it’s activated for RSS or not, and track any changes to that page. Read more about this feature here, on the Official Google Reader Blog.