Hello, my favorite geeky gyrls! This is my first post here at GeekGyrls.com and I thought I’d start out with a new monthly feature of the best geeky tips and toys that I come across so you too can be an early adopter. I’ll strive to compile my own personal geeky finds and spare you the drudgery of hunting them down yourselves. I’ll highlight gadgets, online services and tips on using some of our most valued tools in our business and life. If you ever come across something truly geeky and would like me to include it, feel free to pop me a direct message at Twitter (I’m @VirtuAllin) or let us know in the comments. And on with the geeky show!
As an entrepreneur, keeping up to date on a broad spectrum of information is critical to staying competitive in today’s business climate. I need to know what challenges my potential clients face, what tools are available to them, how others are succeeding and more. Most of us gain this valuable insight through subscription to blogs using RSS feeds. If you need to know more about RSS, check out this cute and informative YouTube video from commoncraft.
So, I love me some RSS. Paired with my need to take in all that great information is my need to push it right back out to my social network. As you know, social networking for entrepreneurs especially is a vital element to growing your brand and establishing yourself as an authority in your field. Two of the most popular ways of sharing this type of information is by using Twitter and/or Facebook to push the best and brightest blog posts and news items out to your list of friends/followers.
Now, what has all of this got to do with my favorite geeky tech toys? Exactly this – I’m going to tell you how I accomplish all of the above with some really fantastic time-saving toys. If you’re anything like me, you’ll adore these and will quickly find you can’t live without them.
RSS Reading and Social Sharing
Some of you may already be using Google Reader to keep up with your RSS feeds. Google reader is decidedly simple yet very usable, it’s free and thanks to a flexible system, quite a comprehensive web-based RSS feed reader.
But to take that power and multiply it by 1000 productivity points, you need Feedly. Feedly not only organizes your Google Reader feeds into a beautiful, clean categorized layout but easily allows you to share the best of the best feeds with other Google Reader friends, Twitter, Facebook and much more! Feedly is a Firefox extension, so if you’re still using Internet Explorer (what???) you may want to make a switch.
Feedly also offers the Feedly mini, a fantastic and powerful tiny toolbar that allows you to recommend any and all web pages you happen to discover – on to your community. It also shows you how many conversations that web page or blog post might have sparked up over on Friendfeed.
One of my favorite features in Feedly is the ‘latest’ tab, which displays the posts of the blogs you’re subscribed to as they’re published. This lets you read and share the hottest and most interesting stuff before everyone else. The first person to post hot news on Twitter is often the one that gets the most ‘RTs’ or ‘Re-Tweets’ and thus more visibility for your brand.
Another fantastic feature is the ‘Karma’ tab. Karma is Feedly’s latest experiment that shows you how people react to the content you’re sharing – how many times your peers clicked a link in something you shared, how many times it was re-tweeted and more!
I won’t go into each and every feature of Feedly here, but I highly recommend you check out my post about Feedly and Louis Gray’s terrific Feedly post and start using Feedly A.S.A.P. I just know you’ll love it! Let us know what you think and clue us in on some of your favorite geeky finds in the comments! Thanks!
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