RSS Feeds - Giving You Relevant Content | Interior Design

Did you know that there is an alternative to your regular search engine that can provide you with content curated directly to your search topics? While most people think that Google is the only way to find information on the Internet, it turns out there is another way that can provide you with specific results to your searches. In only a few simple steps you can be curating content online to get results that are relevant and helpful to you!

Start by downloading the Add-On 'Sage' to your Mozilla Firefox browser. You can then head over to a blog directory such as Technorati, Alltop, or Delicious and start searching! When you find a blog or site that you find informative, simply click the Sage icon in your browser, then click the 'Search' icon, select the RSS site feed, and 'Add Feed'.

When you have added as many feeds as you want, go to Options in Sage, select 'OPML export' and save it to your desktop. Sign up with an RSS Reader such as 'The Old Reader' and import the file into it.

Now you will see a stream of the most current content from the blogs you have chosen! This gives you a constant flow of information that you have tailored to your interests and searches. You can update and add more blogs to this feed as often as you want, making it a great way to stay connected with the information that you care about.

I tried this out myself on Alltop.com, searching for topics related to Interior Design, using a number of different search words including: Design, Architecture, Interior Design, Art, etc. Here's an image showing the stream of information from the ten blogs I chose!

As you can see, after searching on Alltop for probably ten minutes, and by saving ten blogs into The Old Reader using Sage, there are over one hundred posts for me to look at from this. This gives me such a diverse range of information from different sites to look at, all based on the topic of Interior Design.

The most significant difference between using this method of content curation, as opposed to a search engine such as Google, is that when using a blog directory like Alltop, you are guaranteed to find results that are not only relevant, but apply directly to your topic of choice. Contrastingly, when searching 'Interior Design' on Google, these were the top results:

Most of the results I received on Google were for Ads for Interior Designers in the GTA and job listings related to Interior Design. These results can be useful if you are looking for a job in that field or a company in the area, but if you are trying to get information about Interior Design as a topic, RSS feeds are the way to go! Don't get me wrong, Google is a very useful search engine, but when searching for the most current sources available online relating to a certain topic, blogs can be very informative and helpful, because content found on blogs is being updated every minute by people all over the world. This gives you the opportunity to find such a wide variety of information and data produced by a wide variety of people, all in one convenient place!

So now that this blog has informed you about content curation and searching on the blogosphere, go create your own RSS feed and see what useful information other blogs can give you!