RSS Feeds
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Finding yourself short of time and in need of a efficient information retriever? Then RSS Feeds are the tool for you. As a busy, BBA students it is essential that we utilize our resources. RSS Feeds are a great tool that can maximize your time being spent researching. RSS Feeds helps you save time, manage your attention, and find information in just a click of a button.

Today there are lots of tools designed to help you work with RSS Feeds. I plan on focusing on three searchable feed databases tools and give my recommendation of one the most useful tools out there. To begin I choose Blogpulse, IceRocket, and Google Blog Search. From there I decided to search for a topic of particular interest to me: “healthy dieting.” Eating healthy has become a struggle for me because of all that I have going on right now. I find it hard to juggle school and playing a Division I sport, all awhile trying to eat nutritionally beneficial foods.

After conducting my search in the three different searchable databases I found Google Blog Search to be the best out of the three.

Winner

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I may be bias since I have a natural tendency to use Google for all my web-related searches, but I found Google Blog Search to be the winner for these reasons:
  1. Relevance:
  2. User-friendly:
    • Ability to search web or blogs
    • Sidebar gives ability to explore blogs published last hour, last 12 hours, etc.
    • Similar interface to regular Google
    • Free of ads
  3. Staying up to date:

Google Blog Search returned 27,798 recent posts for my query.

Close Second

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In my opinion Blogpulse was a pretty close second. From their homepage you can see it offers four pretty cool features:

  1. Trend This:
    • Solely because of the trend this feature it offers. I found it interesting to see the graph illustrating the trend of results for “healthy dieting.”
  2. Featured Trends:
    • It provides with just one-click featured topics and subjects that people are blogging about. As it states they “did the trend search work for you!” The hottest blogs can be easily found through this feature.
  3. Conversation Tracker:
    • Don’t miss a beat with this feature. It tracks conversations of a particular interest to you for you. This is fascinating stuff!
  4. BlogPulse Profiles:
    • Provides more information on the author of your favorite blogs. This feature allows you to find out more information about a specific blog or blogger.

6,889 recent posts were returned.

Not bad, but not great

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Pros:

  • Offers similar results trend, but breaks it down more for you
  • Retrieves 9 tagged posts
  • Ability to choose dates when published

Cons:

  • Has sponsored ads
  • Busier interface

10,237 recent posts

Conclusion:

Web based feed readers are needed to get you started because at first it can seem very overwhelming with all the information that is available. Each of the blog search databases gives you the ability to multiply your own efforts. Sometimes the features are useless depending on your specific reason for search. Google Blog Search provided the most useful, efficient features making it my preferred blog search tool.

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