If you are not up to speed with RSS, here is a primer.

RSS means Really Simple Syndication - actually it doesn’t matter what it means - all it is is a way of scouring the web and pulling all the information into one place without having to go to each and every site.

Its very powerful. Say you want to keep an eye on what your customers are saying about you, or your rivals. Would you like to be alerted whenever you are mentioned in the news, and then track upcoming items? Are there industries you want to track, software you need to keep up to date, blogs you want to follow. A good RSS strategy can keep you aware of developing trends, help you gain competitive insight and keep you up to date with the latest buzz.

You need an RSS reader, a piece of software that will gather all this information for you and present it on your desktop, or in your browser, or in your email inbox, every morning (noon or night).

The excellent free online Google reader is a good start, but if you want a more professional approach - the even better FeedDemon created by the highly respected Nick Bradbury is worth every penny (less than 30 bucks US). So start yourself off with a Google account, or download FeedDemon and lets see what we can do with it.

Every respectable site produces an RSS feed these days, simply put, its a list of the latest pages, including a short (or full) excerpt. So the first thing you need to do is to tell your RSS reader to follow that site and its RSS feed. The BBC for instance produces a number of feeds for a range of topics. Go to the BBC site, read the primer, and choose a feed by clicking a link in the right column.

If you have set up FeedDemon with the Firefox browser, it will know you have clicked on an RSS feed and pop up to ask you if you want to subscribe. Otherwise you will need to copy the link and paste it into your reader. Most Feed readers offer a way to integrate themselves with your browser, but all you really need is the link to the feed. Feed links use a small orange button, sometimes labeled RSS or XML.

OK so not very interesting so far, you visit a number of sites and subscribe to their RSS feeds, your feed reader will visit them every few hours and pull the latest pages into your reader. FeedDemon can be set up to run in the background and pop up a notice when new items arrive, if you are interested, you can follow the link to the site that produced it. No big deal, but still much faster than visiting hundreds of sites every week.

It gets much more interesting

A lot of search engines produce RSS feeds for the search you have just run. So if you could define all your interests in a variety of search terms, then plug these terms into your RSS reader - you would end up with the web, personalized, customized just for you or your company, and delivered to your desktop or browser.

And its not just Search, the so called web2.0 sites like Digg, del.icio.us, Flickr and Technorati, all produce feeds from their tags and categories. Go to http://del.icio.us/tag/health for instance - see the orange square in your browsers address bar, or the link at the bottom to RSS feed for this page.

OK so “health” may be a bit broad, but don’t worry, your feed reader is going to discard old news for you. But lets narrow these down using a variety of search engines. Lets do a few step by step searches within a certain medical interest range.

Lets try Google News UK for “NHS” (National Health Service):
Here is the search on Google.
And here is the RSS Feed that you can find on the same page.

Now lets head over to Google blog search and plug in “Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital”.
Lets see what the blogs are saying. Hey - these are patients talking about their experiences in hospital!
We don’t want to run this search again tomorrow, so we have another RSS Feed for our reader which will only show us the latest items.

Lets try something slightly different with FeedDemon - Press the “Subscribe” to feed button, choose “find new feeds about a specific topic” from the menu, and enter “healthcare marketing” (for instance). FeedDemon presents a list of blog titles - one of which catches my eye, its called “The Healthcare Marketing Blog” and subscribing to it’s RSS feed is one click away. FeedDemon has done all the work for me.

These examples are Health and NHS related, but the subjects could cover business or personal interests, anything at all - feed readers allow you to compartmentalize your interests through tags or folders, and if you had the foresight to purchase FeedDemon, you could have done all those searches very easily from within FeedDemon, then filed them into your “Medical” folder. FeedDemon goes much further, with the ability to watch folders for keywords, organize with news bins, and includes a comprehensive search tool.

Corporate blogging is now part of the scene, I suspect that corporate blogging is a slight sham if the marketing department is involved. But a company can not afford to ignore its customers- and they are happily pronouncing their opinions in their own Blogs, Wikis and Forums. All of them have their own RSS feeds, and most allow you to enter your own comments.

And of course - here is the RSS feed for W3Design.

It is sometimes very difficult to persuade colleagues to share documents online when you are working remotely.

Everybody is comfortable with email - logging onto an online project management service appears to be a long winded way of sending a document, or updating the status of a project.

The problem with email - is that everyone has to CC everyone else to stay on top of the status of a project. And when it comes to collaborating on text documents, the marking facilities of MS word can be daunting. Why not have one document in one place where everyone edits the same document - (see the video below).

There are many excellent collaboration tools, but one of the easiest is the totally free Google docs. Have a look at this video to get a quick idea of the benefits.

From the official Google blog

If everyone were to use Google docs, you could also share calendars and notes, and chat with Gtalk. But the problem is that not everybody has a gmail account (yet), and Google’s free tools are not all on the same page.

A more professional alternative is BaseCamp (free and paid versions).

After logging in, you post messages and comments, upload documents, collaborate on text revision, create to-do lists and chat with members of the team. BaseCamp uses Milestones, essentially a calendar which can have to-do lists and messages associated with each item. It’s a bit like a private blog where everyone invited is on the same page (literally). The only problem with BaseCamp is that it may take a few hours for technophobe’s to get up to speed (but its not complicated).

A simple alternative I have been using for years for managing website’s, is a private Wordpress blog for all the editors. Upload documents, make posts about text changes or let each other know what you are thinking. A supervisor can then keep an eye on the overall project, and any revision requests will be visible to anyone visiting the blog. No need for endless CC’d emails.

One of the beauties of the Wordpress blog approach is the bookmarklet widget for editing a web site.

Drag a link (the widget) into your bookmarks from the control panel. Now if you want some text edits done on the site, highlight the text in question, and click the bookmark. A new blog post will be made in the maintenance blog, with the highlighted text already filled in. Now copy this text and past it just below, then make your text changes to the copied text - et viola. A new post is made with a link to the page in question and the text edits all ready for approval. Anybody else who wants to make revisions can do so in the comments.

Wordpress uses categories for each post. So if you set up the default as “edit” and perhaps a few others such as “approved” “urgent” and “completed”. The webmaster can then go ahead with any edits to the site after they reach a certain status and mark them as “completed” when the site has been updated. Everybody knows what’s going on.

Not quite as sophisticated as the BaseCamp approach, but not too complicated for the tech-shy editor who doesn’t want direct access to the content management system or an editor who has to go through an approval process.

One disadvantage of this approach over BaseCamp, is that a Wordpress blog will need two sets of logins to make it totally private. One to get past any security features and another to log into your blog account. Sometimes this is too much for the busy editor without a password management tool.