Business Writing Tip: How to Organize Web Information
During business writing courses, we always discuss how to effectively manage the huge amount of information that floods all of us in business email, documents, and websites. This article provides business writing tips to manage your web content:
The easiest tool to organize web information is RSS. It’s simple, will save you much time, and keep you well informed.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it allows you to subscribe to websites and blogs, using an RSS reader or “feed,” so blogs and websites you routinely read are automatically sent to your reader. Information is organized and stored for you, so you can review it in one easy scan when it is most convenient for you.
For work, I regularly read many blogs, business journals, and websites about business writing, business grammar, business email and business marketing. For fun, I read several cooking websites. Ok, I admit I also sometimes follow the announcements for NYC clothing sample sales. Instead of taking the time to go to all these websites to stay current (or score a dress sale), I just log into my RSS feeder and scan by category. I can even save, send or star noteworthy articles.
There are many free good RSS readers. My favorite is Google Reader. Lifehacker summarized the best RSS readers here.
This video by CommonCraft, “RSS in Plain English” illustrates how to easily set up and use any RSS reader:
