Like a lot of folks in the social media space, I follow a lot of blogs, Twitter feeds, YouTube accounts, and other content. According to Google Reader, I average 537 articles a day. I don’t just skim them, I actually have a pretty well-defined system for organizing, reading, and taking action on many of the articles. I call it the “four buckets” system. Here’s how it works.
I subscribe to feeds in Google Reader — a very versatile feed reader that can even subscribe to pages without RSS feeds and let you know when there’s been a change on the page.
My feeds are organized into a dozen or so folders. Each folder name is preceded by a number so they sort in order of priority. In this way, if I don’t have a tonne of time, I’ll just start at the top and be assured I’m getting what I need.
Also from Tod Maffin, here’s how he tracks a wide range of feeds – and acts on the posts that matter to him. As with so much of social media, part of the trick is setting priorities… and part of the trick is a system of web services including Google Reader, Delicious and Read It Later.
