The RSS/LinkedIn connection

Readers of this blog will know that I’m a great fan of RSS feeds. I’ve experimented over the last few months with alternatives to Google Reader, which will rest in peace at the end of this month. I’ve tried to wean myself from it, but I still do my daily reading (and the resulting sharing) via Google Reader. I had installed and then de-installed Feedly, because it was constantly crashing on my tablet (with an old version of Android) – so I used WordPress’s Reader. That wasn’t too smooth either, but got me to share more directly, and blog more. With a new mobile, and a new version of Android, I’m now back to Feedly, which offers a nice user interface, somewhere between Flipboard (too flashy for me) and Google Reader (nice lists). What they also offer is a direct syncing service to your Google Reader account, and this works very well for me. So come time for the Reader, I’ll read my RSS feeds there – like hundreds of thousands of other reader users. But that’s not my lesson for today – while looking into my feeds, and spending more time on LinkedIn again (I’m currently doing an experiment with it), I’ve found that I can flow my LinkedIn feed into my RSS feeds. Now that is awesome. Why? Because I want all my feeds in one place, and don’t want to have to check different applications at the same the time and at the same place – I’m a neat kinda guy, and very procedural. I’ve done this for a few days now (check it out in your LinkedIn settings), and I’m amazed how much I was overlooking by not always scrolling down my LinkedIn feed. Pretty much every day, I’ve picked up what I would call a ‘social news story’ relevant to me (contacts of mine finding new contacs, jobs – or posting info they are not sharing in other ways), and they are making me feel more connecting – and LinkedIn less just like a glorified address book. Yes, my feeds have now pretty much doubled, but I was running out of stories half way through my train commute – and I read much more about my actual audience. And that really interests me.