Keyword Feed Fun

For those who haven't tried it yet, PubSub lets you subscribe to keywords in your RSS Newsreader like you subscribe to blogs. The difference is that you see every blog post that PubSub tracks with those key words in it. And the keyword you are tracking is highlighted. Right now the whole service is free.

This is hot! One big advantage is that I get exposure to lots of different blogs I've never seen before which gives me the opportunity to discover new interesting, informative and/or entertaining voices. Some of which are quite good. It's a nice variety in my RSS news reading. A little like reading the Sunday paper. Fun browsing.

I've got 17 keyword subscriptions going right now. Since I recently purchased both a Zire 72 and a Powerbook, "Zire 72", *Albook* and *Powerbook* are three of them. As I was writing this, I subscribed to *newsmaster* to see what that would bring. It's a snap to set these up: click *Subscribe to Weblogs*, enter your keyword(s), select a language preference, enter your email address and submit. You'll get an email shortly with a link. Click the link and select the RSS Newsreader you are using. Done! Your favorite newsreader has a new keyword feed.

You can subscribe to things on a whim or temporarily. Change around. It's so simple and clean that you can get your subscriptions just the way you want them.

What pubsub does for me is

1. Lets me easily save a search request
2. Points the search at blog space
3. Translates matching blog posts to RSS

Over time I expect to refine my keyword requests to be optimally balanced between being targeted and producing the number of results I want to see. *Powerbook* is a very general search and Albook is narrow. Albook doesn't get many matches. I'm enjoying many of the Powerbook matches so I'll keep both until I come up with something better.

I got clued into PubSub by Roland Tanglao's excellent post: The Lazy Person's Guide to Being a NewsMaster Part 1. Roland gives lots of credit to Robin Good's The Birth of the NewsMaster post.

Regular readers know I am biased towards desktop tools. I'm eagerly awaiting NetNewsWire 2 at the moment targeted for release this month. Sucking the information I want off the internet onto my Powerbook where I can peruse it at my leisure - online, offline, anytime. When I want to save especially good posts, I save them to my personal links blog. This is efficient stuff!

One last thing. I still visit blogs frequently, so don't let your blog go because you think everyone is reading newsfeeds. Every link in a newsfeed goes to a blog *not* to another feed. That may change, of course. Lastly, if I like the look of a person's blog, I like to read it *native* in its full context. But when I'm offline, I'm readin' feeds. There's no choice.