How to Stay On Top of the Latest News About a Particular Product
- by Scott Whigham on December 16, 2008 9:16 AMI'm an admitted RSS junkie - I love RSS because it allows me the most info that I care about with the least amount of effort. If I find a site/author that I like, I always look for the RSS icon - 
- because I can throw the feed into my RSS reader of choice (FeedDemon) and stay up to date. I only subscribe to around 100 feeds but that's mostly because I'm pretty aggro about unsubscribing from inactive feeds.
Anyway... Back to the topic on hand...
Let's say that you want to stay on top of SQL Server - you want the latest news, all the time. You want beta invitations, articles - anything and everything "new" about SQL Server, you want it. How do you do it? Easy: set up a bunch of Watches around key terms in your feed reader.
Like I said, I prefer FeedDemon (which is free BTW). Let me show you how I would set up a watch to keep me notified about SQL Server 2005's SP3:
- Step 1: Set up subscriptions to your favorite news sources
- Step 2: Create a watch for "SQL Server 2005 SP3"
- Step 3: Run the watch:
- Step 4: Check daily!
Suggested Keywords to Watch for
Words and acronyms like beta, alpha, CTP (Community Technology Preview) are big ones to watch for but they aren't the only things to watch out for. Experiment with lots of keyword combinations and you'll probably find that you get it right with about 10-15 words.
You need a few negative keywords as well - things that cause a match not to occur (a.k.a. "stop" words). In my list, I never care about Sony or VistaPrint but both constantly show up "alpha" and "beta" keywords. They go on the stop list!
Google Alerts and Outlook
Some of you might have said, "Google Alerts can send me an email - why set up a watch?" Google Alerts is great but I've had too many false positives. I don't want an email every time "Alpha" or "Beta" is found on the web...
Outlook 2007 also has the RSS reader... Well, fail. Outlook's version of RSS is like a fire hose - just throw everything at the user you possibly can and let them sort it out. You can't set up watches in Outlook. Also, my #1 pet peeve is that Outlook marks RSS entries as an unread email in the Unread Mail view! 
I really have one single unread email and 1019 RSS entries...
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Good post, thanks