Bill Gates is a very busy person since he left Microsoft in 2008. His Bill & Melina Gates Foundation is an enormously impressive charitable operation. To get a feel for its scope, take some time to read the 2010 Annual Letter and take a look at these short videos of an interview with Bill Gates at CNet:

1. Bill Gates on why he’s “fired up” (4:00 minutes)
2. Bill Gates on the lessons of his travels (8:31 minutes)
3. Bill Gates on taking online classes (3:47 minutes)
4. Bill Gates on the need for carbon-neutral energy sources (2:30 minutes)

I am sure you will agree with me that this is fantastic content and something we should all be alerted to when more is published. So it is great to see Bill Gates is starting to use social media to share his information, as he explains in “Bill Gates tries his hand at tweeting, blogging”. He has started using Twitter and he has created a personal blog called “Gates Notes.”

For someone with the resources, brand recognition and quality of content that Bill Gates has, it may be easy to understand that has not focused on the basic Personal Branding strategies that we are all subject to, but interestingly it applies to Bill Gates like it applies to all of us:

Take a look at this friendly SEO advice that Danny Sullivan issues to Bill Gates on Search Engine Land. Before you giggle about how naive the world’s richest man is on this topic, please check if your personal website does better.

I am sure this will get addressed soon. I have bookmarked and subscribed to his RSS feeds, so I can benefit from his insights every time he publishes them.

In the series about Personal Branding Tools up to this point, I have reviewed tools to scan news and to process it. The goal is to be very efficient, so you can absorb all relevant news in a very short time and be sure you have not missed anything. Tools like Google Reader enable you to reduce the volume of the fire hose of information that normally comes at you, by being selective about the sources and topics of information that you follow.

So the question is: how do you select the sources of information?

It is simpler than it may initially seem. As described by Malcolm Gladwell in “The Tipping Point”, more than 80% of the news and information is generated by fewer than 20% of the participants in any ecosystem. So you have to set out to find these content generators for your market niche.

Here are some ways to discover and build a list of the thought leaders and opinion makers in your selected niche:

1. Check for books on your topic of interest on Amazon and note the names of the authors of the most popular books. Use Google to look up their names to see if they have a blog and subscribe to the RSS feed if they do (using Google Reader, see in the previous article for how to do that).
2. Check for conferences about your topic of interest and note the names of the presenters. Find their blogs and subscribe to their RSS feeds.
3. Create a List on Twitter for your area of interest. Use tools such as Tweetmeme, dailyRT or CrowdEye to discover who are the most influential voices about your topic on Twitter. Look them up on Twitter and add them to your Twitter List. Then use this RSS creator to turn the Twitter List into an RSS feed, and subscribe to it with Google Reader.
4. Use BlogSearch at Google to search for blog postings about your topic. When you find entries from writers that cover your area of interest, subscribe to the RSS feeds on their blogs with Google Reader.
5. You can create very detailed searches on Google News or on Google BlogSearch and subscribe to the RSS feeds of the results in your Google Reader.
6. As you start following the selected group of sources, you will notice that they will link you to other sources, by referring to their blogposts and retweeting their Twitter postings. Add these folks to your Google Reader or Twitter list as the case may be.
7. From time to time, review your list to see who can be removed. The goal is to process the news generated by this group as efficiently as possible, so if any source only posts entries that are of no value to you, remove that source.

There, you have done it. You have created the source list for information that you will review daily to be sure you are always well-informed.

At times the list grows because you encounter new valuable sources, but you should also make it a habit to cut back the list by removing less valuable sources.  You keep yourself focused by allowing yourself only a restricted amount of time per day to process the news – as soon as processing the amount of news starts exceeding your time limits, you should cut the source list back.

Notes:

1. There are many more RSS-subscriptions that can be added to your Google Reader. Here are two examples:
   1. Google News
      Create a search in http://news.google.com and then add the RSS feed of that search to Google Reader
   2. Google Blog Search
      Create a search in http://blogsearch.google.com and then add the RSS feed of that search to Google Reader
2. If you are unsure about the authority of a particular blog or other type of website, then there are various metrics that are helpful, such as Google Page Rank, the Alexa Traffic Rank, the number of Inbound Links, the number of Indexed Pages and more. Many free tools on the Internet give you insight into these numbers. Use them to get a feel for the relevance of the website that you want to add to your list of News Sources.
   1. Google Page Rank
      On a scale of 1 – 10, a ranking of the level of importance of a web page according to the Google Search Engine (10 being the highest level).
      Check it out at http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php:
      
   2. Alexa Traffic Rank
      Every website on the internet gets ranked by Alexa, based on the measurement of all users using the Alexa toolbar. The highest traffic site is ranked nr 1. Check out the site at http://www.alexa.com:
      
   3. Inbound links and indexed pages can be checked with Yahoo Site Explorer at https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/:
      
   4. Aggregate data about any website can be obtained with tools such as DomainTrust at http://www.submitawebsite.com/seo-tools/domain-trust.html:
      

One of the highest value blogs for me is Scripting News by Dave Winer. This week he posted an entry – RSS is the universal language of realtime – that included an RSS-feed (that he hacked together) which presents new entries on the New York Times home page in realtime. If you want to be the first to hear the best news in the country, subscribe to the feed here:

http://static.newsriver.org/nyt/HomePage.xml

In “Tools for Personal Branding – Feed Readers” I described how Google Reader is the core of my news collection toolkit. I just added the NYT-feed to the category of global news and was done. No further changes in process, nothing to remember, just better and more up-to-date news in my list.

This is the power of RSS, you gotta love it. And thank you Dave for the feed!

I had a second example of the power of RSS today.

I am working on a project to understand the power and utility of “social media” and “personal branding”. As part of that I have configured RSS feeds for a Twitter Search and a Tweetmeme Channel to cover what the Twitter universe is saying about these topics. But the amount of noise in these feeds is very high.

Today I received a message from Arthur van Hoff at Ellerdale, that proved to be very helpful. Ellerdale is a new generation of search engine that uses semantic processing to sort through the rivers of realtime information generated by Twitter. It detects “topics” instead of search strings, which has much higher fidelity and less noise. The message from Arthur was that topic pages now come with RSS feeds.

So, using Google Reader, I subscribed to:

http://www.ellerdale.com/topics/view/00a4-3fe7/Social+media.html
and
http://www.ellerdale.com/topics/view/0087-d3f2/Personal+branding.html

I dropped the Tweetmeme subscriptions. Again, that was it, nothing to remember, no process to change. Just better information coming in, with much less noise. I get the benefit of the work of the rocket scientists at Ellerdale, without having to make any change.

As I said, this is the power of RSS and you gotta love it

In the article about Feed Readers I reviewed how I use Google Reader to select the news sources that I keep track of. Google Reader lets me quickly browse all new articles in one place and select the ones I want to review (by placing a star next to these entries). In 15 to 30 minutes I see all the news relevant to my areas of interest and have a list of starred articles that I”ll process further. The next step is to read and process the listed articles:

• Most will be just read and discarded (by removing the star), just like one does with articles read in newspapers and magazines.
• Some of the articles require more action, like forwarding it to somebody else by email or posting it to social sites like FriendFeed and Twitter. At the end of each article Google Reader places buttons to do these steps with a single click, but the implementation is so poor that it is not worth using them. Instead, click through to the original article and use a URL-shortener like Bit.ly to send the article on.
• Articles that you want to archive can best be bookmarked and organized with one of the bookmarking tools.  Doing so enables you to build a library of reference material that you use when writing your own material. As you will see in the review of bookmarking tools in the rest of this article, they are especially useful if you want to share such a reference library with a group (such as co-workers on a project).

The most widely used tool for bookmarking is Delicious, a Yahoo service. Once you are registered, you can install a few buttons to your browser”s toolbar to make the process of bookmarking a page very simple: click a button, pick the category and you are done. Take a look at this 3-minute video to get a feel for the process if you are not familiar with it yet.

Delicious is great at sharing and letting you learn from others. But for the purpose of creating a library of reference material, it has a fatal flaw: it does not let you search in the content of the bookmarked articles. It frequently happens that you try to find back something by some snippet of information you remember having read. With Delicious, you can only find it back if it is in the title of the saved article.

Alternatives are Yahoo Bookmarks and Google Bookmarks. Both let you do full text searches, but they do not let you publish your bookmark libraries like you can with Delicious.

The best available bookmarking tool that I have found is Diigo. In the screenshots that follow I will show how I use Google Reader plus Diigo to build (and share) my knowledge archive (click on a screenshot to see it in more detail):

An item "Starred" in Google Reader

Here I have an article “starred” (listed for further action) in Google Reader. I click on the title to see the original article.

Bookmarking the article with Diigo

Hit the “bookmark” button on the toolbar and select “Social Tools” and “Marketing” as tags. I will also check the “Snapshot” box.

My Bookmark Library

The article now shows up in the library that Diigo maintains. The little graphic next to “Snapshot” indicates that I captured a snapshot of the article.

The snapshot of the article

If you check the snapshot, Diigo shows an archived version and an image of the article.

Retrieving tagged articles

And here you see how one can easily retrieve articles by selecting the categories in which they were stored.

This is the basic functionality that I use day–to–day.

Diigo also enables you to highlight parts of pages you bookmark and to add comments. These highlights stay with the pages. This is particularly useful if you maintain a shared library with a group of collaborators.

There is also a range of reporting features. For example, I used Diigo to create a list of articles and websites that are relevant for this blog post (find it here).

For a more detailed overview, take 10 minutes to look at these three videos on the Diigo website.

Just the day after I posted the article about Google Reader an article was published on ReadWriteWeb (RWW) with the title ”RSS Reader Market in Disarray, Continues to Decline“.  The story states that the number of unique visitors to RWW who use Feed Readers has been declining and that the Feed Readers have made little progress recently in terms of features and functionality.

No doubt, the tools interacting with social media feeds have been in the center of attention in the past year. But their hype does not yet make them as useful as the best feed readers. And the data to support the article comes from just one source and does not yet represent a trend.

The comments that the article receives, demonstrate that for most people the news readers are truly useful and are the primary tools used to follow what is happening. This is very true for me as well. The report about the death of RSS Readers seems to be greatly exaggerated.

The writer of the story, Richard MacManus, states that he follows Twitter and Twitter Lists for news multiple times per days and only uses Google Reader for specific searches. Implied is that the Twitter model is somehow superior.

RSS News Feeds and Social Media Streams are two distinct content streams that are kept separate by their technology, not by substantial semantic differences:

• Twitter allows you to subscribe to an RSS feed of the results of any search at search.twitter.com. Why no RSS feeds for individuals and/or lists?
• Google Reader could support the Twitter API and present Tweets to the user like all other XML content.

Either of these two approaches would allow us to mash the two content streams and use one reader for both. It would greatly simplify my life, and I guess that of many others as well.

When you are working to build your personal brand, it is important that you contribute relevant and timely information about your topic of interest. I assume you have chosen a topic to which you can add value based on your passion, skill and passion. But a large part of your ability to be relevant and timely comes from the hard work you put in research, writing and distribution/promotion of your content. And if you are like most of us, you have only limited time to dedicate to your branding work, so being efficient and finding the right tools will determine whether your efforts succeed or not.

There are great tools to help you save time and make it easier to get your brand out. And many of these tools are free.

The first step of your daily routine should be to get an update on the news in your market segment. You want a complete update, in as little time as possible. It is easy to spend way too much time on this, so let””””s focus:

• Let's turn off television's morning news, you waste at least 40% of your time on commercials, and the rest is so general and void of content as to be useless.
• The newspaper is not that great also. Even if you find something there that you can respond to, it is hard to link to it. And chances are that most of what you read was already in the online version yesterday.
• You have access to the same information as your local news station, it is on the real-time web.

The major news in politics, business and finance is generally released by the major news channels. For the rest, original content is generated on blogs by subject experts (you want to be one of those over time). Of all the material that is published, what is relevant usually becomes evident in minutes by the amount of response it gets on Twitter and Facebook and – soon after that – by the number of blog entries created on the topic.

So the game is to discover all that news before breakfast (and do that every day) and make your plan about what you””””ll use to add your viewpoints to. The tool you want needs to present you all the relevant news in one place, make it easy to scan and bookmark it for further work.

This is a link to the web site's RSS feed

Such tools are called “feed readers”, “RSS readers” or “aggregators”.

The websites that contain the information you are interested in, generally make it available in a format called an “RSS feed”. They have an orange icon like this, and clicking it will give you instructions on how to subscribe to it.

And you can aggregate the RSS feeds you subscribe to with an RSS reader into one page which is organized to let you scan it fast, keep what you want to keep and discard the rest. It is your personalized newspaper online, just much more convenient.

There are many RSS readers (see here for a list), but unless you have very special needs, you can make the safe choice: use Google Reader. It is very feature complete, it is constantly being improved and it has excellent documentation.

To start using Google Reader, you have to have a GMail email address. As you will see later in this series, you should get a gmail address for many more reasons, so if you do not have it yet, get one *now*.

Find Reader in your GMail menu

If possible, get an email address that resembles your name (like firstnamelastname@gmail.com or something close to that), because that will be helpful to your personal branding efforts.

Once you have your gmail account, the menu along the top will show you an option to go to Google Reader.

The first step is to add subscriptions. You probably already have a list of websites and blogs that you read regularly because they provide the most valuable information on the topics that you want to keep track off. Check each off these sites for the RSS Feed button and click it – usually that provides steps to add them to your Google Reader. If not, copy the URL of the feed, and then use the “Add A Subscription” link in Google Reader to add it to your list (see “Subscribing” for a detailed description of all the options).

It may take a few weeks of adding and subtracting feeds until you feel you have just the right set to make you comfortable that you have found the right balance between quality and quantity. As a general rule, you should be able to process all the news and postings in about 30 minutes and at the end not feel the need to go other sites to get ””””the rest of the news””””.

Apart from keeping track of websites and blogs, Google Reader can also be set up to track Twitter messages. You can define a detailed search on Twitter and then subscribe to the RSS feed of the results – that way Reader will track the latest tweets on your topic and enable you to process them in the same way as any blog entry (see the next paragraph). One way to find the topics that are most significant is to include “RT” in your search criteria, giving you only tweets that were retweeted (and therefore more authoritative). Or you can track just the tweets from certain persons. Another option is to work with the channels at Tweetmeme, in which you can define search criteria (once you are logged in). The results pages of these searches also come with an RSS feed, so Google Reader can keep track of tweets meeting your criteria.

Now that you have your subscriptions in place, lets see how you work with Google Reader:

Processing News Items with Google Reader

In the left sidebar you can see that there are 45 unread items. In the right column these items are listed. Working down the list of items will change them from “unread” to “read” and they will disappear from your view. But before they do you can take any of these actions, simply by clicking the little icons along the bottom of the item:

• Add Star. I use this to mark the entries that I want to use for anything I want to write about later. When you are done reading, you can return to the starred items and refer to them for your own postings.
• Like. This is valuable to teach Google Reader what is interesting to you. You will be able to sort your items “by magic” as Reader calls it, but that uses what it has learned from the items you liked.
• Share. This lets you copy these entries to a URL where your friends or the public can see the items that you thought were interesting. I have a page like that at http://www.google.com/reader/shared/mdevisser.
• Share with note. This is the same as the previous one, but lets you add a note that explains why you share it.
• Email. Lets you send the item by email to anyone you think who needs to read it.
• Add tags. Adding tags lets you organize the entries so you can find them back easier. You can also set up Reader to share items with certain tags with friends or public.
• Send to. This lets you send the item to other services such as Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed.

Scanning the news with Google Reader is fast and efficient this way. You'll see the news item, in most cases you'll just pass to the next one (and let Reader mark it as read for you), or you take any of the 7 steps above. When you are done, you have seen all the relevant news, you have shared the best items with friends or have sent it to them by email, you have Twittered about some of the news items, and you have a list of starred items to use for that great blog entry that you are about to write.

You're done with the first step of your daily routine, time to go downstairs for breakfast.