In the spirit of auto-tune, you can construct your own shipping newspaper in 1-2-3...
By Ryan Skinner (email)
A few days ago, I challenged either the Maritime Executive and Maritime Network groups in LinkedIn to establish the best shipping news channel anywhere.
How? Each has 7000+ members, and a news feed that can be customised with any number of sub-feeds. In other words, news from all the major shipping magazines, newspapers, blogs and web-sites can be automatically piped into this news channel. So, you have a super-feed - all the shipping news fit to digitize.
Then this news channel has a very simple, unique feature. It shows how many times an article has been viewed and puts the most-read articles at the top of the pile, until they get too stale. With 7000+ subscribers, each of these groups has a stronger readership than many of today's shipping publications. As a result, you get access to a user-qualified list of the most interesting news available anywhere.
In the course of discussion around this idea, I understood from many people that they did not know how feeds, or RSS, work. And if they don't know RSS, then they don't know how to use a news aggregator to make a customized online reading experience. For more and more people, this is the only way to get news. It's like the perfect newspaper; it has all the news you want, it's free and it's available whenever and wherever you want it.
I will talk anyone interested through the few steps needed to start up your personal shipping news channel.
1. Go to Google and search for "Reader". You'll be proposed "Google Reader". Go there. Here, you'll be asked to login with a Google log-in name. If you don't already have one, make one. It's free, and you can use the same ID for dozens of other Google-powered tools.
2. Now you are in Google Reader. This is the window where you'll get your news, but you need to fill that window up with your favorite news sources. There are different ways to add news sources. You can go to a news site, or blog, and search for RSS, or "Subscribe", or a button that looks like this: