#writetip: feedly for writers

Five years ago, IT professionals predicted RSS feeds were going to change the future of web browsing. Welcome to that future. Introducing, feedly.

Before the ipad ‘invented’ electronic newspapers, there was Google Reader. Every day millions of people use Google Reader to build virtual newspapers customised to their reading habits. This process is made possible through RSS feeds; a list of article headlines and summaries fed from a website. Such feeds can be subscribed to through any central ‘reader’ application. In this case, Google Reader.

The saturation of blog content has now reached a sweet point where RSS feeds finally seem to make sense to those outside the interweb sanctum. For writers in particular, using RSS through an application like feedly (more on that later) represents an opportunity to refine and improve the online component of the craft, making the web less procrastination and more production.

Why Blogs are Great (really)

Novel writing, for the most part, is a solitary pursuit. Unlike many who participate in a busy office-based profession, novelists don’t get to rock up to a novel workplace each day and have novel conversations with other novelists whilst working on a team novel project with a novel HR department taking care of our well being.

Hence not only can the writing profession get quite lonely for a novelist, there are also very few support mechanisms in place to supply standard workplace benefits such as training and development, task management, as well as access to new ideas, trends and perspectives. Few of us have access to a daily mentor, and if we do, many of them are dead (Conrad, where were you last night when I needed you…).

For some, the absence of such common workplace mechanisms is a blessing. For others, the absence puts pressure on the individual to provide similar means of support whilst also attempting a complex artistic project. And though many of these benefits come second place to the real job (writing), some support is beneficial to both the art and craft of novels.

So how does a something like feedly help?

Using feedly (a mirror of Google Reader) allows you to stay abreast of all the content you are interested, without visiting each and every website you enjoy. If you do nothing else, using feedly will cut your regular browsing time by more than 2/3, providing more time for writing.

I browse because I get inspiration through exposure to external influences, virtual or otherwise; images, words, conversations, perspectives. I also find that without a novel workplace, it can often feel that this thing I’m doing is really a bit silly. That writing a novel is not really ‘serious’ in the same way turning up to the office at 8am is. I have no novel boss to hand my daily time sheet to.

All those interactions you have at work, good or bad, create a sense of legitimacy for your organisational purpose – even if that purpose stinks.

So in a tragic kind of way, connecting to a community of online writers and publishers helps me legitimise the challenge I face day in day out: the blank page. Whilst not all writers blogs necessarily assist in the practical realities of putting pen to paper, as a group (or fellowship) they provide me with a sense of ‘common purpose’, something I’ve become used to when working within a team that shares common goals.

In addition, there is much to learn from others success and failures and plenty to gain from connecting in a meaningful way with other writers. Conversations carried through the comments on a blog post can be motivating and insightful. Twitter can reveal otherwise missed opportunities for writing competitions, journal submissions and grant applications, not to mention networking with potential publishers. Networks completely unrelated to writing, such as photography, can provide inspiration and insight into subjects you plan to explore in your writing.

Sure there are perhaps too many people out there willing providing advice on how to go about your writing career, and much of it will be ahead of where you are at. You might not want to know how to conduct an impromptu book signing just yet.  But there is more going on here than ‘pat-on-the-back’ creative procrastination.

The Future is Feedly (at least for now)

As I said in the introduction, Google Reader is like your own virtual newspaper. Only in Google Reader, if you find an article you like, you can share it with a click and someone else connected to you can read that article. They can like it (or hate it) and that information is passed along, slowly building to a snowball of community likes and dislikes against the article. By the time I get it, it has a recommendation or rating attached to it. The higher the recommendation, the more prominent it is in my Google Reader account.

Feedly takes this concept and makes it look good. Damn good.

Feedly is available as a free Firefox and Chrome plugin and provides improved view of the content in your Google Reader account. Feedly is not a replacement or alternative for Google Reader, it is your Google Reader. It looks at whatever is in your Google Reader account and provides an enhanced view of it. You don’t need to maintain two accounts for this to work.

Feedly takes the options that already exist in Google Reader – share, save for later, email – and adds an additional social networking layer; post to twitter, share on facebook, digg, tumblr to name a few. If you are one of those ‘man-about-town’ socially aware writers who gets a buzz by sharing all the great content you find, then make a space in your heart for feedly. If you are using Google Reader at the moment, then get ready to blush.



Feedly is not another social networking profile to maintain. It is the hub of your existing web browsing experience. When you load feedly (it installs a nice green button next to your address bar) you’re presented with a personalised ‘digest’ page of all your current feeds. It learns from you and from the recommendations of others, presenting content in a simple yet intuitive way – the sources you read from the most move to the top of your digest page. The stuff you read the least fades away, but is always close at hand if you need it again.

And what is all this content? Let’s use an example.

I’m writing a section of my novel set in the arctic. Unfortunately for me, I’ve never been to the arctic. So I read a lot of books and articles to try to get a feel for some of the authentic details. To complete the picture (or at least get close without actually being there), I want visuals. So instead of spending hours on flickr searching for arctic photos on one night binge, I want a constant stream of arctic photos coming through so that it feeds my ongoing writing habits.

I go to Flickr, do a search for the tag ‘arctic’ and down the bottom of the page is an ‘RSS feed’ option. This allows me to subscribe to any future photos uploaded to flickr with the tag ‘arctic’. If I want to take that further, I look for the tag ‘svalbard’ which is the remote island I’m writing about in particular. Now I have a regular feed of arctic visual inspiration coming through my feedly page. The photos I like can be saved, the rest just turns over as I go through them (or ignore them).

Google Reader already does this of course, but feedly makes it look good and the view is much more apprpriate for images. I find images for my #coffeebreak writing challenges using a similar method.

Twitter on Speed

Everything you ‘share’ in feedly (as easy as clicking the icon called ‘share’) is passed through to your personal ‘shared items’ feed. This is an RSS feed, and like any of its kind, your personal feed can be subscribed to and distributed out to another website for others to read. For example, the “Around the Web” content in the right hand side column of this page is my personal shared items feed. It gets updated every few minutes when I am using feedly. If people like what they see, they can subscribe direct by clicking on the “more items” link, or via feedly if they have it.

By creating a free Google Reader account – which doubles as your log in for feedly – you are able to then connect to anyone else with a similar account. This is done by searching for a person’s name or email address. Should you wish to follow the reading habits of someone you admire (for example an industry professional or influential writer) then you can do that simply by searching for them in Google Reader.

This follow functionality can be as powerful as you want it to be. Like twitter, you can search for people you admire or respect, and follow the items they read. Unlike twitter, a reading list is generated by a simple click of the button, making it much easier for others to share items. As a team at work, we use feedly to share industry news around the team. Each of us has their own Google Account, we follow each other, the love spreads around. You can ignore the follow feature altogether, and just go it on your own.

As said earlier, feedly is not another social network. It will speed you up, not bog you down.

What Else is Cool About Feedly?

When useful articles pass through your account, you can save them for later. This is great for saving submission deadlines or short story competitions without interrupting your browsing experience.

Google Alerts works with feedly. ‘Debut novels’ are my thing, so I save that search query using a Google alert and feed it into my feedly list. Now I don’t have to wait for somebody else to fill me in on the newest releases from first time authors, I get a feed which I can check everyday, or every month. The frequency is up to the user. Much better than alerts by email.

Twitter posts can be searched and fed into feedly. I run a campaign tracking system for the company I work for. We like to know when people are talking about our campaign on twitter (the campaign has a very distinct name). Twitter allows me to search for a keyword and generate an RSS feed of the results. Now if I want to know the latest twitter activity, I can just check my feedly page.

One of the most rewarding and effective ways to build an online presence as an author is by participating in other people’s blogs. By monitoring blog content in feedly, you can be more selective of what you comment on, quickly reviewing and saving the blog posts you’re most interested in for commenting later.

Get Started With Feedly

Feedly is not going to be for every person. But it is going to work for a lot of people who currently spend a significant amount of time reading and collecting online.

A couple of pieces of advice as you venture forth:

1) When you first install feedly, don’t let it ‘recommend sources’ for you – it happens to do a pretty bad job of it (in my experience). If you have Google Reader already, feedly will just mirror your existing sources using your Google log in. If you are starting from scratch, here is a list of my writing blogs you can import into your Google Reader account (right click file ‘save as’ XML). Use at your own risk.

2) To keep you using feedly (old habits die hard) set your feedly page as your default browser homepage – that way it will always be front and centre.

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You can get the latest version of feedly from www.feedly.com. To create a Google Reader account (required for feedly) visit reader.google.com. A feedly iphone application is currently in beta testing.

Has feedly worked for you? What do you use to monitor your online sources?

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