Stay On Tops Of The Latest News
Once you get into business, reading the newspaper becomes imperative. Knowledge of current affairs not only helps you interact intelligently with your counterparts, but often, the latest happenings also influence your business decisions. Here is how you can use technology to stay up to date, to the minute.
You happen to be someone who reads the newspaper every morning. In fact, sometimes you get up half an hour earlier just to do so and not to seem uninformed during the lunch-table conversations at the office. However, by afternoon, you find that people are already discussing some other news--often events that occurred just an hour earlier--and you have no clue about it. If you find yourself in such a situation far too often, you should probably make technology your ally.
Here are five ways to make good use of tech tools to stay in sync with current affairs:
1) Feeds: Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and Atom are two similar technologies that allow readers to subscribe to websites such as newspapers, newsletters, magazines and blogs. These enable you to receive articles or notifications as soon as they are uploaded, by e-mail, as pop-up updates on your computer, or even as an SMS on your mobile. You do not really have to worry about how to use these technologies. Just look for a 'Subscribe' or 'Receive updates by e-mail' link on your favourite websites. Click on that, enter your e-mail address or mobile number as required, and you are ready to go.
2) Newsreaders: Tools known as aggregators or newsreaders act as news-pullers. They pull in the latest posts on all the websites that you have subscribed to, and present them as one collated list, making it easier to browse through. Bloglines, Feedmarker and Google Reader are popular examples.
3) News-pullers on the browser homepage: Google offers an easy way to do this, by enabling you to add newsreaders to your browser's homepage. There is an option called iGoogle, which you will find somewhere on the top of the page when you open http://www. google.com. You can set iGoogle as your homepage, and customise it to include all that you wish to see every time you open your browser. Of the many options available, such as the time or weather, you can also choose to see the headlines from various Indian and international news websites.
4) Podcatchers: What newsreaders are to text news, podcatchers are to podcasts. Podcasts can be thought of as blogs that are in an audio format. Many international news websites offer breaking news as podcasts, often including expert analysis and interviews of related personalities too.
5) Mobile updates: It is also possible to get news updates on your mobile phone. Google News is available on the mobile. Websites like Sify and Indiatimes offer news updates on the mobile. Most mobile service providers offer news updates by SMS, for a low subscription fee.
Yahoo! Mobile lets you view the RSS feeds that you have subscribed to on the My Yahoo! homepage, on your mobile phone. There are also news aggregators like mobilerss.net and RSS2mobile, which act as typical RSS news aggregators for the mobile phone. The extremely popular RSS feeder and reader FeedBurner also has a mobile option (http://mobile.feedburner.com/~proxy). Since it is now so easy to keep in touch with news, you can opt to receive the headlines from various categories of news that interest you, be it governance, sports or business.
We also suggest you keep a few international news feeds on your list, just to make sure you can have appropriate conversations with business associates from other countries. Reading the newspapers of the regions you operate in also helps understand the local psyche and hence you will know just how to greet your clients and engage them in meaningful talk.
All said, I would not recommend that you stop reading the newspapers in the morning, because somehow, reading the news online can never beat the 'original' feel of reading the news in print, in the same reporting style, font and size you are used to, not to forget the love-hate smell of newsprint!
Once you get into business, reading the newspaper becomes imperative. Knowledge of current affairs not only helps you interact intelligently with your counterparts, but often, the latest happenings also influence your business decisions. Here is how you can use technology to stay up to date, to the minute.
You happen to be someone who reads the newspaper every morning. In fact, sometimes you get up half an hour earlier just to do so and not to seem uninformed during the lunch-table conversations at the office. However, by afternoon, you find that people are already discussing some other news--often events that occurred just an hour earlier--and you have no clue about it. If you find yourself in such a situation far too often, you should probably make technology your ally.
Here are five ways to make good use of tech tools to stay in sync with current affairs:
1) Feeds: Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and Atom are two similar technologies that allow readers to subscribe to websites such as newspapers, newsletters, magazines and blogs. These enable you to receive articles or notifications as soon as they are uploaded, by e-mail, as pop-up updates on your computer, or even as an SMS on your mobile. You do not really have to worry about how to use these technologies. Just look for a 'Subscribe' or 'Receive updates by e-mail' link on your favourite websites. Click on that, enter your e-mail address or mobile number as required, and you are ready to go.
2) Newsreaders: Tools known as aggregators or newsreaders act as news-pullers. They pull in the latest posts on all the websites that you have subscribed to, and present them as one collated list, making it easier to browse through. Bloglines, Feedmarker and Google Reader are popular examples.
3) News-pullers on the browser homepage: Google offers an easy way to do this, by enabling you to add newsreaders to your browser's homepage. There is an option called iGoogle, which you will find somewhere on the top of the page when you open http://www. google.com. You can set iGoogle as your homepage, and customise it to include all that you wish to see every time you open your browser. Of the many options available, such as the time or weather, you can also choose to see the headlines from various Indian and international news websites.
4) Podcatchers: What newsreaders are to text news, podcatchers are to podcasts. Podcasts can be thought of as blogs that are in an audio format. Many international news websites offer breaking news as podcasts, often including expert analysis and interviews of related personalities too.
5) Mobile updates: It is also possible to get news updates on your mobile phone. Google News is available on the mobile. Websites like Sify and Indiatimes offer news updates on the mobile. Most mobile service providers offer news updates by SMS, for a low subscription fee.
Yahoo! Mobile lets you view the RSS feeds that you have subscribed to on the My Yahoo! homepage, on your mobile phone. There are also news aggregators like mobilerss.net and RSS2mobile, which act as typical RSS news aggregators for the mobile phone. The extremely popular RSS feeder and reader FeedBurner also has a mobile option (http://mobile.feedburner.com/~proxy). Since it is now so easy to keep in touch with news, you can opt to receive the headlines from various categories of news that interest you, be it governance, sports or business.
We also suggest you keep a few international news feeds on your list, just to make sure you can have appropriate conversations with business associates from other countries. Reading the newspapers of the regions you operate in also helps understand the local psyche and hence you will know just how to greet your clients and engage them in meaningful talk.
All said, I would not recommend that you stop reading the newspapers in the morning, because somehow, reading the news online can never beat the 'original' feel of reading the news in print, in the same reporting style, font and size you are used to, not to forget the love-hate smell of newsprint!
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