Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Happy February! Many bloggers are in the midst of school, work, and/or NYFW prep. If you’re in Seattle like me, you are probably gearing up to cheer on our Seahawks in the Super Bowl parade today!

Now that we’re back in the grind, how are your resolutions coming along? One that I’m continuing to work on is being more efficient with my time on the computer – so I can spend that time enjoying life away from the digital world. On the never-ending quest to be more organized and productive, here are a few tools I use regularly that help me get the job done efficiently, whether that’s note-taking, reading all the articles I find, and clearing out the digital clutter...

I’m interested to see if Sulia — a news recommendation platform that offers intelligent filtering by subject — can provide a suitable, more open alternative. But can diversity and precision really work well together?

Concept and LayoutSulia is a strange kind of hybrid. It feels like a social network, albeit one that is based around news; it has users, a kind of following system, and every post is adorned with controls such as Like and Comment. But it is also, quite clearly, a full-blown news aggregator, equipped with Prismatic-style intelligence, that pulls in stories from unaffiliated Twitter feeds, blogs and media outlets...

With Google ringing the death knell for its RSS Reader application, the July 1 curtain call has kicked a number of companies into action as they vie for the market left by Google Reader’s closure. Digg has already thrown its hat into the ring, as it plans to build an RSS app with the best of Google Reader’s features. And Feedly is benefiting too.

Earlier this week, another RSS service opened in public beta called Ping.it, offering an interesting feature called ‘Probes’ which lets users create very specific feeds based on keywords and popularity. Ping.it and probes Ping.it launched initially in private beta back in December, before Google revealed it was pulling the plug on Reader. At its most basic level, Ping.it is an RSS reader. But it’s the new Probes feature that’s particularly interesting.

For example, if you only want to receive feeds on “YouTube videos on Reddit with more than 1,000 Likes”, you can create a Probe that taps both YouTube and Reddit to present this information directly in your feed. Without creating a Ping.it account, all you can really do is subscribe to probes created by other users....