RSS Feeds and Alerts 1. Welcome Welcome to RSS Feeds and Alerts. What are RSS feeds? Well, I’ll show you in this module, but RSS really just stands for, Real Simple Syndication. Think of it as subscribing to your own personal newspaper that only feeds you the information that’s import to just you. That’s what RSS can do. 2. Learning Objectives Let's take a look at the learning objectives. In this module you’ll learn how to automate your searches, so that the results from your searches are fed directly to you in an RSS reader. My personal preference is to use Google’s RSS reader, but there’s a variety of different ones out there and of course you’re free to choose which one you like. Another thing that you’re going to walk away from this module with is the ability to subscribe to search engine alerts via email, so that Google for example, can send you an email message anytime it finds a new page that meets your criteria. 3. Overview There might be other ways to describe what an RSS feed is, but in my opinion I like to think of it as a private newspaper. Alerts on the other hand, is more like an agent that works for you. You give it a certain set of criteria and what it does is it sends you an email message whenever that criteria is met kind of like an alarm would work when the clock strikes a certain time. This works when Google strikes a certain page for example. 4. RSS Like presets on your radio RSS are stations of information that is delivered to you when you want to hear it or read it. Like a preset in your radio, the signal that's going into that station on your radio is always there and you don’t hear it until you turn your radio on and set it to that particular preset. Likewise with RSS feeds. You subscribe to a feed and you don’t have to read it until you’re good and ready. It doesn't mean that it's being delivered to, it's actually been held for you or on your behalf on something like for example, reader.google.com. Almost any website that has date sensitive information, such as blogs and other similar kinds of social content almost all of them publish a form of RSS whether it's, RSS or Atom or a different kind of feed. With an RSS reader you can subscribe to things, such as search results or updates from a particular blog and have them all delivered to the same page on you reader, so you can track which ones are new, which ones you’ve read, which ones you perhaps liked by putting a star or a checkbox next to them and so on. 5. Alerts And now remember when I said that Google doesn’t provide search engine results in an RSS feed format? Well, that’s because they have Google Alerts instead. So what you can do is, get the search to work just the way you want on Google and once you have the right search string– RSS Feeds and Alerts –again less than 1000 results, ideally somewhere in the 250 to 300 results range––then take the key words that you used or the search string itself, not the URL of the answer, but the key words themselves––I’ll show you in a video in a minute here––copy that and paste it into the search box on Google.com/alerts. You’ll be given a choice of whether you want to look for all content or news, blogs, web, groups and a few other choices. Simply choose either web or all. If you choose blogs it’ll only search blog postings and not news sites or other web sites. Likewise, if you choose one of the other categories, but you can choose either all or web and it’ll basically conduct that search as if you would search on the Google search box. From here you can select to receive alerts daily or weekly or even as it happens. The only problem with doing it as it happens is, if you have a search that is to broad, you’re going to be getting a lot of frequent updates and it’s going to well, clutter up your inbox. I recommend creating a Google account just for your alerts rather than using your company email address or a Gmail account that you already have. The reason for that is, when you send everything into that Google Alerts email account that you created, that end in of itself is searchable, because Gmail is built around search you can effectively search through your alerts. Also it keeps your inbox from getting cluttered and in the event that you do accidentally do a search that has too many results well, let’s just say you can go in there and clean it up a lot easier if it’s not part of your mainstream production. Yahoo also publishes something similar, but since they provide results from Bing, you could do alerts or you could just subscribe to the RSS feed from Bing. 6. VIDEO This is one of those times where its better just to show you. Lets start with a simple google search for example lets try a LinkedIn search. I'm looking for tax managers in the Atlanta area, as i press enter you will get some results. This is from a previous example we did in a different module. All we had to do to convert this to an RSS feed is grab this search string and take it to and RSS reader. I like to use Feedly.com, its free and I can use it online from any device. From feedly.com all you do is click "add content" and paste the RSS feed. Before you do that you will need to translate the search into an RSS feed. So, grab the search string that you know works very well, take it to google.com/alerts once there paste the search string that you already tested and know it works and wont give you false positives and then there are a couple of options that you should probably look at. So we'll click on the show options and show you what they are. The first is that instead of delivering this to your email you want to turn this into an RSS feed. We're working from the bottom up. The next one shows you a choice of how many results you want sent to the RSS feed. You don't want only the best results you want everything so we'll change that. You can customize this to a geographic region and to a language if you'd like. Now we are ready to create the alert. Once the alert has been created you can grab the RSS feed by right clicking on the RSS icon and notice a menu item that says "copy link" RSS Feeds and Alerts - that is the link that you simply drop into Feedly. So now we're here, you paste it, hit enter or return and we have created a subscription for the search. To save it you can change the name, I am going to call it Tax Manager, Atlanta, but you can type anything you want in here. Now i am going to save it to my folder called sourcing. I've already created a feed but now what I am doing is I am organizing. Now that I created it and added it to the sourcing folder you see both my Tax Manager, Atlanta and a previous one I made called Tax Manager, LA. Notice there are not results because google assumes that any results from when you created the search were already viewed thus it will show you only the new results since then. New results will be bold and appear here. Check this regularly and you can say you have done your sourcing for that particular search string. 7. IceRocket Meltwater After having looked at that video you should have a good understanding on how to grab an RSS URL and paste it into your reader. There’s a variety of different search engines out there that allow you to copy their results and subscribe to them in a reader. IceRocket is one of them. If you go to IceRocket, you’ll see a tab for blogs and later on I’ll show you what Big Buzz means, but for now let’s just take a look at blogs. And in here you can search for blogs and blog postings that meet particular criteria for example, The Hard Skills for Your Ideal Candidate or maybe some of the natural language that we’ve talked about before, like I work for or I write code. Perhaps you can also search for other types of job titles or company names or even product information. You could use this as a way to find competitive intelligence as well. In any case, from an IceRocket search click on the RSS button at the left. You do have to have a subscription account, it’s free, but if you have an account you can then publish your results as an RSS feed. From Technorati, which is Technorati.com, you can also conduct advance searches and subscribe to the results. For example, you can subscribe to post for a blog or comments for a blog, maybe even tags on Flickr or video searches on YouTube.