Having spent most of this week in bed, I feel spectacularly unqualified to write my usual “week in review” post. Instead, I’m going to answer a question I get a lot: how do I keep up with what’s going on in the digital world?

The simple answer is: I spend time in it. But to keep up with news, I’ve gotten into a routine that I follow pretty much daily, aside from when I’m sick/ in the last stages of a pitch/ out of town. It might sound like a lot, but I generally spend an hour each morning completing all the steps listed below.

Of course, this is just what works for me – lots of other folks have routines they prefer, and you can tweak this to your satisfaction. Here it goes:

1. Check Twitter

I check my Twitter feed first because, being real-time, it is generally the source for the most up-to-date news. At this point it’s worth while to spend a few minutes discussing who I follow on Twitter.

Scanning and re-tweeting

I primarily use TweetDeck to browse Twitter, and as a default I believe it opens up your friends’ 100 most recent tweets. For me this is a good amount to scan through every morning. The word “scan” is important – I definitely do not read every tweet. I flip through looking for words that jump out for me, paying particular attention to my favorite tweeters (sorry, I know how obnoxious that phrase is, but it’s descriptive). If I see something that is well-written and immediately interesting to me, I re-tweet it (I prefer the old-style of retweets: using “RT” or “via” syntax, rather than Twitter’s new built-in retweet feature, but that’s just me. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read this).

Friends and followers

It’s really important to get your Twitter list to a point that is useful and relevant for you. I use WeFollow and Twitter lists to find new and interesting people (you can see what Twitter lists I’m following here). I also follow people I see my friends/ favorite tweeters talking to (or sending out Follow Friday recommendations for). Finally, I have a column set up in TweetDeck that shows new followers, and if they don’t appear to be total jackasses/ spam/ porn stars, I follow them back. Also, I’m not shy about unfollowing people if I don’t find their tweets useful.

A note about Twitter

A lot of people ask me what Twitter’s good for. The simple answer is that it’s not right for everyone. For me, it’s become similar to how I use RSS (see below), because the topics I’m interested in (digital, social media, technology) are heavily discussed on Twitter. If your interests are, say, medieval history and Danish shoe cobbling, you might have less luck (although you never know, times are changing). I also think that it’s increasingly important for people who work in digital media to have a respectable Twitter presence. I’m not talking a million followers, but you have to participate. If you don’t, it says something about how much you really know about your profession. Reading articles about Twitter is not the same as participating, because it’s constantly changing.

2. Read your “required” RSS feeds

Google Reader is my favorite place on the internet. It’s the single biggest source of information, entertainment, inspiration, and procrastination that I know.

What is Google Reader?

Feel free to skip this section and the next if you’re already a fan, or if you have an alternate RSS solution that works for you. Google Reader is an RSS aggregator. Learn about RSS here, and RSS aggregators here.

If you have a Google account, which you probably do, you have Google Reader – click this link to view yours.

Setting up your feeds

Just like Twitter is only as valuable as the people you follow, Google Reader is only as valuable as the sites you subscribe to. Personally, I subscribe to hundreds of sites. However, as with Twitter, I don’t read them all. I have set up a list of sites that I call “required” – meaning that I try my best to read all their posts every day. Together they generate about a thousand posts per day (see the next section for details on how I manage these posts).

Like Twitter, it will take time to get your list of “required” sites to a happy place. If your interests overlap with mine, you can start by subscribing to my required sites. Also, you can subscribe to my list of “Shared” items (for more about sharing, see the next section).

Scanning and processing your feeds

Even within my “required” feed, I don’t read every post – the beauty of Google Reader is its simple interface, which lets you quickly navigate from post to post by using the “J” key. I generally scan through the headlines and only read posts that strike my interest. If an article is interesting, I will do one of the following actions:

1. Share – If I think something will be interesting to share with my Twitter followers, I open the article in a new browser tab for processing in the next step (see below). I also generally mark the article as “Shared” in my Google Reader.
2. Read later – If it’s a long article and I don’t have time to read it at the moment, I use the Read it Later tool. This is a nifty application that integrates with Firefox as an extension, and adds an icon to each article in Google Reader. Adding a post to this tool causes it to be automatically downloaded to the companion iPhone app as well. I’m experimenting with Instapaper, a similar tool that also supports downloading to the Kindle.
3. Save for reference – If the post contains information that I think I will need to reference at a later time, I add the link to my Delicious bookmarks with relevant tags.

3. Share interesting links

Now we’re back to Twitter. I like to share interesting links that I find via my Google Reader on Twitter. I use a tool called HootSuite for actually publishing tweets (I use TweetDeck, mentioned above, mainly for reading tweets). In my opinion, HootSuite has two killer features.

1. It lets you schedule tweets for a later time – As I mentioned above, I complete this entire routine in an hour first thing every morning. However, I don’t want to send out 10 tweets within the span of 15 minutes for a few reasons. First of all, it’s annoying to see 10 tweets in a row from one person. Secondly, I like to space my tweets throughout the day so that different people see them at relevant times. If I sent out all my tweets in the morning, someone who checks their Twitter at lunchtime wouldn’t see any activity from me at all.
2. It tracks clicks to the links you share – Other services do this as well, but HootSuite has a nifty tracking mechanism. It shortens the URLs you share so that you can track how many people click on them. This is interesting because it helps you see how popular different content is with your followers. If someone retweets you, but keeps the HootSuite URL, you can count those numbers as well.

So, for each of my open tabs, I set up a tweet, scheduled at approximately half hour intervals throughout the day.

Summary

Shew. That’s a lot of text to describe something that doesn’t actually take a lot of time. However, be reassured – most of the work is in the setup, not the daily reading.

At this point I should probably say that, although I spend about an hour doing the bulk of my work reading and sharing, I do check Twitter and HootSuite periodically throughout the day to see how people have responded to my tweets. I’ll also reply to anyone who’s asked a question about something I shared. I also might check Google Reader if I have time over lunch.

That’s it! I hope this was helpful.