Dear K-Loggers,



I usually visit 10 sites a day, but I keep track of 50.  How do I do it?  I

subscribe to the sites I want to track using my K-Log's news aggregator (I use

Radio's built in news aggregator  http://radio.userland.com).  All the new posts

to the sites I subscribe to are automatically gathered for me by my news

aggregator.  The results are displayed on my "news" page in Radio.  So, all I

need to do is scan the news page to find the good bits I need.  If something is

really interesting, I visit the site to get the full story.



Employees at most corporations spend lots of time gathering news.   What types

of news do most employees spend time acquiring daily?  Here is an expanded list:



1) General news from newspapers and magazines (everything from Business Week to

the NYTimes -- Radio is bundled with the NYT).

2) Journals and specialty sites.

3) The weblogs of other employees.  For example:  Marketing people can subscribe

to the weblogs of product managers and sales teams.

4) Info from competitor sites (specifically the PR section of those sites).

5) Financial news for the company and competitors (Yahoo finance and other news

aggregators).

6) Application generated news (sales data, financial data, server performance

data, customer service data, etc.)

7) Discussion group posts both internal and external (discussions about company

products or important topics -- Yahoo Groups has a news feed)

8) Personal sites (like Dilbert cartoons, sports news, etc.)

9) Corporate internal news posted to the Intranet.



A news aggregator can automatically acquire all of this data and display it on a

single screen.  It boils the time spent getting informed to scanning and

reading.  Nice.



Based on my experience, my news aggregator saves me 45 minutes a day.  That's

time I would have spent hunting and gathering information.  This tool leverages

my time and makes me more productive.  I also get news much faster than I used

to.  Usually days faster.  So I much better informed than I was prior to using

the tool.



So, given that my news aggregator saves me 45 minutes a day and my hourly rate

is $100 (as an employee), my daily savings is $75.  That's $16,500 a year that I

save my employer.



Let's take a look at the ROI (return on investment) for a 200 person company

with a $50 an hourly rate.  If every person using a news aggregator saved 45

minutes a day on average (I think this is a solid estimate given the breadth of

information that can be and should be acquired daily), the total savings that

company in employee time would be a whopping $1,650,000 a year.  The cost to

equip each person with an aggregator?  $7,990 (Radio is $39.95 a desktop and

doesn't need expensive portal software to provide this service to employees). 

That's a 205x return on investment in the first year (20,500%).  Basically, the

investment pays for itself in the first day.  Note: Scale this up to 10,000

employees and the savings would be $825,000,000.  Wow.



That's a no-brainer investment.  In addition to being more productive, everybody

is better informed -- faster -- than they used to be.  Also, since the news

aggregator is on the desktop, employees can take it with them on a plane flight

(or home) on a laptop, search the archive (there is a tool for this), and use

the info on their K-Log.  It also makes it possible to use a dial-up connection

while on the road or at home to quickly synch up with the news from 50 sites in

a couple of minutes (rather than crawling sites over a slow 28.8 connection).



Note:  there are tools that make it easy for motivated employees to create feeds

for sites that don't have public feeds available (like the PR sections of the

sites of companies you want to track).  It only takes ten minutes to create a

feed.  Also, these feeds can be shared with others once they are created.  I am

planning to write about how to do this later this week.



Sincerely,



John Robb

http://jrobb.userland.com





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