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6 Ways to Filter Information
Social Media — By Matthew Tommasi on August 30, 2009 at 8:24 pm

Knowing how to filter out the noise when searching for information on the internet can really make a difference.

Filtering out information that you you don’t want, can help you find exactly what you are looking for. Often knowing what you don’t want when performing a search can sometimes be more effective than knowing what you do want.

There are many ways to filter information and it is really very simple once you know how.

Here are six ways that will help you filter information on the internet.

LazyFeed

Lazyfeed is a service that pulls in information from various places around the web, such as twitter, blogs, social networking sites, etc.

Lazyfeed allows you to subscribe to any topics and get live updates. Just save any topic you are interested in, and forget about it.

Lazyfeed will remember and let you know when there’s new content on that topic, just like an instant messenger. Lazyfeed allows you to stay on top of everything you care about, effortlessly.

Check out my guide on how to setup and use Lazyfeed – Lazyfeed: Real-time Content Discovery

Google Alerts

Google Alerts are emails automatically sent to you when there are new Google results for your search terms.

Google Alerts currently offers 6 variations of alerts – News, Web, Blogs, Comprehensive, Video and Groups.

A News alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search

A Web alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search

A Blogs alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search

A Comprehensive alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice

A Video alert is an email aggregate of the latest videos that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Video search

A Groups alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search

Have a look at my guide on how to set them up – How to create Google Alerts

RSS

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has been around for a long time and is a very easy way to be notified of new content on a website.

There are two ways you can check for new content on a website.

1. Browse directly to that site and see the if there is any new content yourself
2. Subscribe to that site’s RSS feeds and have all new content sent to you

The problem with the first way is if you browse to your favourite site and look for something new and it’s not there, you have wasted valuable time. This is especially so if you have many sites you regularly check.

RSS is a much faster way for you keep up-to-date with new content, where new things from all your favourite sites come to you instead.

Check out my Really Simple RSS Guide on how to setup and use RSS.

Tweetizen

Tweetizen is a simple web-based tool designed to help you filter the daily influx of tweets, and easily find the ones that are relevant to you. Use Tweetizen to create twitter groups, and you’ll be able to stay on top of what’s happening in all your areas of interest.

There is so much information being generated on Twitter every day, with so many different conversations it can be hard to keep up. Tweetizen’s filtering mechanisms will go through the millions of tweets and come up with the pertinent ones by taking tags and keywords into consideration.

My guide Filter tweets and create groups with Tweetizen shows you how to setup and use Tweetizen.

TweetBeep

TweetBeep is a service that allows you to receive Twitter alerts by email. It’s like Google Alerts for Twitter.

Get emailed when someone is twittering about you, your company, your product, or your website.

Check out my guide Tweetbeep – Twitter alerts by email on how to setup and use TweetBeep.

Twitter Hashtags

Hashtags are a way for Twitter users to group tweets associated with a specific topic.

Hashtags bring some order to a user’s published updates and make it easier to follow a topic of interest.

While you can use Twitter’s search function to find other people and messages, the hashtag allows users to sort topics into useful categories to revisit later.

Check out my Twitter Hashtags guide on how to setup and use Twitter Hashtags.

These are just a handful of ways you can filter information.

There are many, many more and I would love to hear what ways you use to filter information.

Tags: filter, Google, guide, how, information, instructions, linkedin, setup, Twitter

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