Web Worker Daily

We all have to follow never-ending streams of information to varying degrees. Small business owners and web workers have to keep their fingers on the pulse of what’s happening in their markets and with their customers and clients. Writers and bloggers read for inspiration and to follow the latest trends.
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When I’m talking to people about social web sites, one of the questions I often get asked (usually just after the one about whether you actually need to join all the social networks, just because everyone else is) is “how do you keep up with everything?” People are often concerned about the amount of time it takes to read all of those tweets or updates, and wonder how in the world they will be able to keep up with everything, while still finding time for their work or hobbies. My answer sometimes surprises people: you don’t have to keep up with everything. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I admitted that I am an information junkie, and I wanted to follow up this week with a few tips for feeding your information habit by mining Twitter for information. Twitter tools are popping up like weeds lately, so rather than try to be comprehensive, I’m just going to highlight a few of my favorite tools for getting information out of Twitter.

Twitter Search

Twitter’s built-in search engine is probably my favorite way to find information in Twitter. It is great for quick searches to find specific pieces of information, watching trending topics, and persistent vanity searches for your name or company. While I do use the search engine to type in queries, the real power is in using RSS feeds for searches and running them through Yahoo Pipes for additional filtering. In many cases, I use Yahoo Pipes to loop through a series of keywords from a CSV file to search Twitter for each of those keywords and monitor the results as an RSS feed in my reader. I recently did a 2 minute video explaining exactly how to search twitter using Yahoo Pipes and a CSV file of keywords, so I won’t cover it in any more detail here. Read the rest of this entry »

Hi, my name is Dawn, and I am an information junkie.

I love learning new things and sharing them with others, and you can see this trend by looking back across my posts here on WebWorkerDaily and elsewhere. You’ll see many posts focused on finding and consuming information. As I write this blog post, I’m sitting in a coffee shop getting ready for a meeting with someone who has agreed to spend some time demoing Yahoo Query Language (YQL) to help me learn even more techniques to feed my information habit.

I’m also an avid Twitter user, primarily because it is a quick way to consume a variety of information, from keeping up with personal friends to discovering new tools to little nuggets of useful information. Read the rest of this entry »