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Honing My News Aggregator

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November 13, 2020

I’m honing the feeds on my news aggregator (Feedly) in an effort to stimulate my thinking and engage readers of my blog and social media via better stories and insight.

Out goes the mindless “content marketing” feeds produced by those producing copy merely to draw attention.

In stays the stories and posts from those driving valuable discussion and thought. An A-List of people and sources such as:

The lack of diversity will be corrected as I continue to go through my feeds.

I’ve been using a news aggregator for almost twenty years as a source for news, for items to share and as a means of engaging the sources and subjects of the items I read from my aggregator.

But the volume of junk produced, some of which I thought important or insightful for whatever reason, has grown to the point it drowns out the insight from the A-Listers.

No one had coined the concept of “content marketing” when I began using an aggregator. People writing stories and posts did so in a real and authentic fashion in order to help others and stimulate thinking and discussion.

I could subscribe to new feeds from people I didn’t know and usually get some pretty good stuff. Same for subscribing to subjects (words and phrases).

No more. People write content, or have it written for them, in order to generate attention, subscribers and customers. Little insight, little value and no engagement.

So I started pulling an A-List together last night from the hundreds of sources and subjects in my reader.

If you look at the writings of these folks and the others I’ll add, you’ll see they cover areas far beyond my industry. These folks think out loud, giving me and others an opportunity to listen in – to learn and to be inspired.

I’ve found my news aggregator pretty boring of late. What used to be an hour or two each morning of reading some great stuff and sharing it on social media has slowed to a crawl.

Little learning. No meeting new people and engaging those I already knew through sharing what I was reading,

I miss my old news aggregator, as well as the relationships and, truth be told, the business it generated via engagement and the stimulation of business ideas.

So I am going to create an A-List and see if I can get things rolling again.

Stay tuned.

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