Lazyfeed: A Great Tool for Poetry and Everything Else

There are thousands of poetry blogs on the Internet, and more are created every day. All around the world, people are self-publishing their creative work in what has become a revolution in the world of poetry publishing. It's impossible to keep up with all the new poetry that's put online each day. Traditional tools, like subscribing to every blog via RSS, can create an overwhelming barrage of reading material, more than a single person can get through. And even if you do subscribe to a lot of poetry blogs, how do you find new ones? Some poets are kind enough to post their work on Twitter, but this doesn't work well for longer poems and still has the same problem of discovery.

Wouldn't it be great if there was a tool where new articles from poetry blogs would come to you with minimal effort, and all in real time? Enter Lazyfeed: a relatively new tool in the world of real-time blog searching. The concept is relatively simple. Lazyfeed allows you to search the internet by tags on blog posts. It brings up the most recent posts that have the tag you're looking for. There's been a considerable amount of buzz about this service over the past couple weeks, most of it stemming from the enthusiasm of tech blogger Louis Gray. Here's a screencast from the site's creator that provides a more in-depth summary of the service:



Obviously, Lazyfeed is useful for any number of topics, but it's a great way to solve this aforementioned problem of finding and reading a large number of poetry blogs. By simply adding "poetry" as on of your saved tags, you can use Lazyfeed to retrieve all of the new posts written on the topic. From there it's very simple to share your finds on Twitter or Facebook, and to add your new favorite poetry blogs to an RSS reader. If you're looking to explore the ever-expanding world of poetry blogs, then Lazyfeed is definitely a tool for you.

DailyLit Brings Books to Your E-mail Inbox

If you're like me, you spend a great deal of your day sifting through hundreds of tweets, blog posts, e-mails, and Facebook posts. In between, all of us manage to squeeze in a book or two over the course of the week, and if we're lucky, even a few poems. Wouldn't it be great if you could get some reading done while you're slogging through all those e-mails and RSS feeds? That's where innovative service DailyLit comes in.

As their helpful graphic above illustrates, DailyLit takes short stories and novels, cuts them into easily digestible pieces, and feeds them to you through RSS or e-mail. Many of the newer books require a small fee [usually around $7], but there are over 800 free books available.  If you're already a regular Google Reader user, it seems like the RSS option is really the way to go. And the service even allows you to sign in with your Google, Facebook, Twitter, or OpenID account.

If you spend your whole day on the computer, this is definitely something worth looking into. Though it's not a replacement for leisure reading, it's a great way to get through some of those reads you may have been putting off.

Feedly: A Useful Tool for Poetry and Everything Else

Sometimes the best sources for researching poetry are the sources that are good for researching anything else. For example, you can get a lot of poetry information just by doing a basic Google search for "poetry", "poems", or "poets". What I want to share with you today is just such a source: a tool that is great for getting information about anything, but can be put to great use for finding poems and poets.

One of the ways I get a lot of the information that I share on Twitter is through RSS [Really Simple Syndication] feeds. RSS is a format through which sites can be subscribed to, and new content can be aggregated and viewed at a central location, called an RSS reader. Google's online product for reading RSS feeds, called Google Reader, is almost unparalleled in its efficiency and ease of use. I've been using Google Reader for a long time to monitor my favorite news sites, blogs, and poetry sites. Recently I came across a great source that enhances the usefulness of my Google Reader feeds.

Feedly is a Firefox add-on [Thankfully, it works with Firefox 3.5!] that syncs with your current Google Reader account, but gives you a much richer, social reading experience. Above you can see my Feedly cover page from a couple days ago. It shows, in a magazine-like style, some of the most popular recent stories from the RSS feeds I am subscribed too. In the left column it shows which feeds have new stories, the middle two columns include some of my feed categories, and the far right column has my recent Twitter stream.

The key to Feedly is its Twitter, Friendfeed, and Digg integration. By glancing at an expanded story, you can see how many times its been liked on Friendfeed, how many diggs it has, and how many times its been shared on Google Reader. With a single click you can share the content on a plethora of social sites as well. This add-on has become my Firefox start page and has revolutionized the way I use and think of RSS feeds.

So what does all this have to do with poetry? Well as you can see, I have a poetry section for my feeds that allows me to monitor specific sites. But beyond that, Feedly offers a search feature that really kicks things into high gear. When you type a term into the page's search box, it gives you the option to "explore" or "search". Search just gives you results from your own feeds like Google Reader, but Exploring a term like "poetry" gives you a page like this:

You've got results from your own feeds, from a Google News search, from Twitter and Friendfeed, and video, pictures, and other content from the web at large. This feature allows you to track a particular interest like *cough cough* poetry across most of the web at a glance. I've taken to checking the explore page for poetry throughout the day as a way to see what's going on with poets all around the Internet. Overall, Feedly makes it easier for me to find out about the things I care about, and to share them with people I know everywhere.

Update [10-19-09]: Though still in early alpha testing, Feedly is currently porting its fantastic product to to both Chrome and Safari browsers as well as Firefox. Follow @feedly_chrome and @feedly_safari for more information.