Today, I’ll continue the discussion about our process for information processing at AccelerEyes. It has been a vital part of how we built AccelerEyes. I hope this process will also be useful in developing thoughts for this blog.
We use two primary feeders for new information and thoughts: Google Reader and Twitter. This post is focused on Google Reader, and I’ll discuss Twitter in a later post.
Google Reader is an essential component of our daily routine, used for two main purposes: 1) to process Google Alerts (which I’ll discuss tomorrow), and 2) to discover new articles and information which might be useful.
The key to Google Reader is to keep it manageable. I manage mine with the following process:
- Loading up great blogs and information feeds is important (termed “subscriptions” in Google Reader). See the link below for the startup feeds I currently have loaded. It’s equally important to remove blogs that have low value to keep from new item inundation. This is especially important when designing good Google Alerts.
- Processing new items several times a day keeps the queue from growing too large. It is convenient to process new items while on the move with mobile reader apps. I use the Feeddler RSS Reader Pro app for iPhone.
- Step 1 for Processing: Do a quick pass through all the new items and simply star the ones that need a closer look. For me, this ends up being ~1-5% of the new items. The 5% or under number is probably good target, because it means sifting through a lot of information to limit attention to the best nuggets. I typically do this step from the mobile app.
- Step 2 for Processing: A couple of times a week, process the starred items. This simply means opening the articles in each star and scanning through to see if it is something worth submitting to Instapaper or otherwise invoking some action. Only ~10% of the starred items end up going to Instapaper for me, which provides another useful filter for my attention.
Today I had 90 new items on 116 total reader subscriptions. My Google Reader contains subscriptions for startup blogs from Atlanta, startup blogs outside Atlanta, blogs and alerts related to AccelerEyes, and a few personal blogs. I’ve posted my list of startup blogs here. I don’t share the AccelerEyes-related blogs I follow because we consider those to be a competitive advantage for our business, enabling my team and me to operate more efficiently than our competition.
How do you use Google Reader? Which RSS feeds do you follow? Are there any startup or business blogs not on my list that I should follow? Does your business use RSS feeds to gain competitive advantage?
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