Local Real Estate News and Alerts - Stay Informed!

Posted January 16th, 2006 by Max Chirkov
in
In todays real estate business craze it is really hard to be updated on all the new trends and news related to the industry nationwide and locally. But don't forget we're living in the technology age, so we must utilize available to us knowledge and tools. I'm reading a lot lately and I never thought I would ever read this much in my life. Trying to stay updated on all the new things that interest me, somewhat related to my life, work and happening every day in the world. Well, yes, it takes a lot of time to follow everything, but at least I know the data is gathered (through multiple sources), sorted and waiting for me to access it at any time and get the latest updates. It is much worse when you don't have it. There are free technologies and tools that will allow you to stay informed on all the topics you want, from the sources you choose, and there are even some tools that will email you alerts on the most important for you news. Actually, to stay informed is not that hard, the hardest part is to find the time to suck it all up from the web pages :) I would like to talk about RSS feeds, news readers and news alerts that I find very helpful if you want to stay informed about your industry, local market and other things you can think of. If you already know what RSS is you can skip it by scrolling down to the next section. Introduction to RSS A lot of people out there already know what RSS is, but for those that don't, here is quick explanation I found at Wikipedia.org:
RSS - Really Simple Syndication, a family of XML file formats for web syndication used by news websites and weblogs. ...The technology of RSS allows Internet users to subscribe to websites that have provided RSS feeds; these are typically sites that change or add content regularly. To use this technology, site owners create or obtain specialized software (such as a content management system) which, in the machine-readable XML format, presents new articles in a list, giving a line or two of each article and a link to the full article or post. Unlike subscriptions to many printed newspapers and magazines, most RSS subscriptions are free.
Basically, syndication of content is more like a distribution through specific channels (feeds) and we can access a lot of those channels for free. The addition to this beauty are RSS readers/aggregators - the software that actually subscribes you to chosen feeds and supplies up-to-date news and articles from them in very simple and at the same time sophisticated manner. It's like the best newspaper ever that has all your favorite papers and magazines in it and every time you open it up it shows latest publications. You can organize your subscriptions by categories, add new ones and delete those you don't like anymore :) Well, different software has its own features and options. Most of the news portals, online papers and magazines provide their RSS feeds (I called them channels earlier) for free and you can subscribe to as many of those as you want. Finding Feeds Most of the News Readers (RSS readers further) can search for feeds on selected pages and will subscribe to them automatically. Sometimes you will see similar graphics to by clicking on it will open the RSS/XML feed where you can copy and past the URL from the address bar into your RSS reader. Let's take for example Inman Real Estate News - (honestly, I had too look through about 5-6 pages before I found it) they have Real Estate Website Content page. There is an RSS graphics and a hyperlink which you click on and it takes you to another page with more specific subscriptions. I used RSS reading script to implement RSS news into my real estate directory and you can see live example at Real Estate News page. I basically created a little news reader just to have those on topic news handy :) You can add RSS links to your own RSS reader, whatever it is online or desktop based, and you will be able to see headlines or even read through the whole content without leaving your reader. If you don't know direct sources of information you can use news search engines and blog search engines. For example: If you know your local newspaper's web site, check them out, I'm pretty sure they have feeds too. Here is my local newspaper and I hooked up to them. Do you see how they have all their news topics separately, so you wouldn't have to subscribe to all of them. Pretty cool huh? Reading News with RSS Readers Now, if you want to stay informed and have all your news feeds in order and updated on daily/hourly bases you gotta get one of those RSS readers. There is a big choice, so you might want to check out a few of them before you stick with something you really like. Some of them more flexible and advanced, other very simple - just to get the job done. There are two kinds of RSS readers - web based and desktop applications. As you probably already guessed, web based RSS readers are online and can be accessed from any computer hooked up to the Internet. Desktop applications need to be installed on a specific PC. So, this is purely your choice. Here are a few examples: Google Directory has quite a choice of desktop RSS applications for Windows and MacOS I haven't tried them, except Sage - which is an extension for the Firefox Browser. I looked at a few screenshots of desktop RSS Readers and some of them look pretty neat - reminding me of Outlook Express: Some of that stuff looks pretty good, but I prefer web based since I'm working on 3 different computers every day and would like to have my feeds available to me at any time :) I'm using Bloglines and Google Personalized Home. Btw, did I mentioned that Bloglines is powered by Ask Jeeves? Here is what my Google Personalized looks:
And this is my bloglines:
Google Alerts Another very useful tool by Google - Google Alerts. Still in Beta, but working great for me and others. You can create specific searches trough google web search, groups, or news; set up update frequency as often as once a day, as-it-happens or once a week and new updates will be emailed to you every time they are available. I like to get emails related to local business and events - I get them every day. Check it out - you might like it.

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