Morning Coffee Squeeze

JUST A FEW YEARS ago, I could view all my overnight emails, flick through all my essential news headlines and assess early submissions on my e-learning site before finishing a second cup of coffee. Nowadays, I have additional burdens in the form of expanded e-mail discussion lists, microblog items from Twitter and Jaiku as well as follow-ups on Facebook. I need to squeeze everything back into two cups of coffee and that means managing more by RSS. I want to be able to start my day knowing about the information I monitor as well as having my iPod synced with my audio subscriptions and ensuring my mobile phone is backed up on my laptop. My mobile phone also grabs my newsfeeds and holds them in its memory so I can flick through hundreds of headlines during dead time. Several operating principles are helping me along my daily routine and three of them are worth sharing.

1. It's good that Enterprise Ireland is serving up some good reading material as newsfeeds---like the  Enterprise Ireland e-business mailing list in RSS format. You don't need to be subscribed to pull it into your newsreader. Here's the feed:
http://news.enterprise-ireland.com/read/rss?forum=ebusiness_discussion&rev=0.92
I hope to convert mailings from BECTA, ICTE, and Open into RSS feeds as well.

2. Both my Twitter and Jaiku news flow appear Google's Newsreader. Although that's helpful, sometimes the flow from Twitter is incomplete. But Twitter itself offers delays in its information flow so a slow feed isn't surprising.

3. I can get my Facebook minifeed as a newsfeed but nothing else. I hope Facebook allows RSS from groups and generates a more comprehensive newsfeed from my personal profile. I'm not holding my breath on that, however.

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