This is the second in a series of posts in the Organize Your Digital Life series.

If you’re like most folks, you have a lot of websites to keep up with.  For example, here are some of the sites that I try to stay updated with:

• My first grade daughter’s teacher’s blog
• My wife’s blog
• My favorite sports team news
• Google Earth Blog
• Local News
• Humor (Dilbert, etc)
• Blog from our church
• Various tech blogs (TechCrunch, Lifehacker, etc)

There are probably a lot of sites that you regularly check right now, but you do it by visiting each one to see what’s new.  That leads to two problems:

1. There’s nothing new and you wasted your time.
2. They had something new last week, but you missed it.

The solution is to start using a feed reader, like Google Reader.  You can tell it which sites you want to “subscribe” to, and they all show up in Reader.  Because it’s web-based, you can check Reader from any web browser and from most mobile phones.  Here’s a quick look at how it works:

Reader is a wonderful solution to help you keep with up a lot of sites.  However, that only tackles half the problem.  You probably also have accounts on Facebook, Twitter and/or LinkedIn and you try your best to keep up with them. Google Reader doesn’t handle those, but there are some great options.  A variety of companies have created software that allows you to easily keep up with your Twitter, Faceook and LinkedIn friends.

The options I’ll show below are all very similar.  They allow you to group your items into columns, and new updates appear automatically.  If you have an extra monitor (or an old laptop), it’s great to leave one of these running off to the side so you can see what’s new.

The columns can be almost anything you want.  You could have one to show Facebook updates, one to show Twitter updates, one to show Direct Messages on Twitter, one to show LinkedIn updates, etc.  Rather than visiting all of those sites, you can have the latest updates come to you.

Here’s some of the best programs for that right now:

• TweetDeck is the most popular right now.  It runs on both Windows and Mac and is free of charge.
• Seesmic has a variety of products and they’re innovating very quickly.  They have software for Windows and Mac, and they also have a web-based version you can use.
• Sobees is similar, in that they have a Windows version and a web version.  No Mac client yet, though.  This is currently my favorite application, but the others are close behind and it’s got a few bugs.
• Tweetie is a very popular client that is Mac-only.  It’s a simpler design (single column) and works very well.
• HootSuite a powerful web-based client that is growing in popularity.

I know that might be a lot to digest.  If you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed, here’s the simple answer: Go download TweetDeck and start playing with it.  It has a great mix of features and you’ll be up and running quickly.

Here’s a quick look at how to get started:

If you have any questions about any of this stuff, leave a comment and I’ll be happy to help you out.

This is the second in a series of posts in the Organize Your Digital Life series.

Organize Your Digital Life 2 – Keep up with the sites you care about is a post from: MickMel

Anil Dash has a unique idea (via Steve Rubel), though I’m not sure if it’ll take off or not — embedded blog posts.

Anil figures that if people are always embeddeding photos and videos, why not let them embed the text of blog posts too?  It seems like it might be a good idea.

The main problem I see is this:

• A lot of bloggers prefer to link and comment about other posts (like I do) and wouldn’t want to embed the full post.
• A lot of other bloggers have a hard time embedding code due to WYSIWYG editors and their lack of HTML knowledge.

There’s still a lot of bloggers left in the middle, so this idea still might find a big audience.  Even if it doesn’t end up becoming popular, you’ve gotta give Anil some credit for a very creative idea.

Another potential problem stems from the fact that the blog content you embed is still live.  If the author updates it on their end, it automatically updates on your site.  For many things, that’d be great!  However, if the author decides to put up a XXX image instead, you’ve got problems.

As a blogger, is this something you could see yourself using — either offering embedded code of your posts, or embedding other posts in your site?

Embeddable blog posts? is a post from: MickMel

Google Reader is the primary source of information for most of my blogs.  I track nearly 400 blogs in Reader, which help supply links and content for my various sites and also allow me to keep up with my own sites.

A while back, Google Reader added a “Discover >>” link to their site, which provides recommendations to add to your reading list.  I didn’t use it much for a while, but now it’s become a daily stop for me.

The recommendations page lists about 15 blogs that it thinks you might like, based on your current reading habits.  Each blog shows the number of current subscribers (in Google Reader and iGoogle only), the title, a short blurb and the average number of posts/week.

At first I was disappointed that I couldn’t view more than a single page of recommendations, but I’ve developed a nice workaround.  Each day, I pull up the recommendations to see what’s in there (see the image on the left).   Then I simply deal with all of them.  If a blog sounds useful to one of my niches, I’ll subscribe.  If not, I’ll click the “no thanks” link to make it go away.  Once the list is empty, it’ll stay empty for the rest of the day.  The next morning, though, it’s back with new items!

The thing I need to get better about is cleaning out blogs that don’t post information that is useful to me.  I do my best to unsubscribe, but I’m usually trying to dig through a lot of items so I just plan to “get back to it later”.

If I see an item that is blog-worthy, I either blog about it right then (if it’s time sensitive) or give it a star.  When things cool down in the evenings, I pull up my starred items list and work through it.  As I blog about each item, I remove the star and it goes away.

Any other tips for dealing with a large number of feeds?

Discover more great blogs in Google Reader is a post from: MickMel