A Tool To Increase Your Economic Value In Our Knowledge Economy

Hi!

I'm making a guess here, but I'll bet that since you've taken the trouble to stop by The Cool Time and Money Blog, you're a knowledge worker of some sort whose long-term economic health (translation: lifetime wealth) is closely tied to your ability to acquire, digest and internalise new information, and to then use that new knowledge in a productive fashion.

If my stab in the dark is correct, then I think you'll find this excerpt from an old USA Today (August 1st 2005) article interesting:

USATODAY.com - RSS feeds college students' diet for research:
"RSS feeds college students' diet for research

By Anh Ly, Gannett News Service

Lilangi Ediriwickrema, 21, peruses summaries of the latest articles about stem cell research. She quickly dismisses the first three articles but pauses on the fourth before clicking to read the entire story.







Pluck can notify you when a Web page includes an RSS feed, making it easy to subscribe to the feed and track its contents.
Pluck.com

A time stamp on the corner reveals the article was posted just two minutes earlier.

'It saves me a lot of time and energy,' says Ediriwickrema, an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania. 'I can quickly find what I'm looking for without having to go from Web site to Web site, and I get the most up-to-date information.'

Ediriwickrema is part of the growing number of on-the-go, sleep-deprived students who recognize the value of an Internet technology called RSS and are milking its benefits for use in the classroom. "

It may take a little while before the usage of what's referred to in that excerpt as RSS becomes as widespread as email, but some Internet pundits believe that day will come. Scott Paton of the Internet Marketing Center, for instance, reckons the chief catalyst of this will be the world's richest man. Apparently, Bill Gates is planning to make bookmarking RSS feeds as easy as bookmarking web pages is today via some variant of a Favorites tab in the next iteration of Internet Explorer, which will be IE 7.

Let's see what happens in the coming months. Anyway, it might interest you to know that my personal understanding of RSS was that it stood for Really Simple Syndication. That's certainly what most people assume it officially stands for. But I've also come across one reference which said it can alternatively stand for Rich Site Summary and something else even more opaque.

Most of us truly couldn't care less, either way! Most days, I don't either!

The reason I bring this up today is simple:

The intentionally tight focus of The Cool Time and Money Blog on:

• Financial planning;
• Goal-setting; and
• Time Management

means that it appeals to certain site visitors who look upon this blog, its associated site www.FreeCoolArticles.com, which provides the online reading populace with free articles on financial planning, goal-setting and time management, and my weekly GET BETTER ezine as a growing, hopefully increasingly rich, store of content.

The flip side is that my blog, my site and my ezine will not appeal to those who aren't interested in those three key life planning disciplines, which is perfectly OK - this is a (more or less) free planet!

If you're unsure if my material is worth returning for, you're welcome to dig a little deeper to figure out who I am.

And, if you like, at my main business site www.RajenDevadason.com you'll also be able to read what others think about my material. I'll leave it to you to decide what to do then.

Should you opt to make The Cool Time and Money Blog a part of your regular journey through cyberspace for education, edification and entertainment, it might make it a little easier for you if you take note of three ways to gain access to my information:

• You can always just visit the main URL, which is
  http://the-cool-time-and-money-blog.blogspot.com/ and bookmark it; or
• You can make a note of this slightly longer piece of code,
  http://the-cool-time-and-money-blog.blogspot.com/atom.xml, which is what RSS readers need to be able to pick The Cool Time and Money Blog out of the billions of web pages that now exist in cyberspace.
• Or most painless of all, you can simply click on one of the little buttons on the right sidebar of this page under the words 'Your Warmly Invited to Subscribe...' or even on those words themselves. But for those to work, you'll need to have some place to send the information to such as a My Yahoo or My MSN account, so that would need to be opened first. Doing so is relatively painless and you can get a feel for it simply by visiting Yahoo or MSN.

Sigh, I apologise for making this the most technical post I've written so far, but I thought it made sense to address the issue today. If all this has done is given you a headache, please forgive me. If you're still up to reading free articles, please do drop by here.

Take care and have a great day info-trawling!

Warmest regards,

Rajen

Rajen Devadason is CEO of RD Book Projects and its sister company RD WealthCreation Sdn Bhd. He lives in sunny, peaceful Malaysia with his gorgeous wife Rachel. He's a Malaysian Securities Commission-licensed financial planner, a life planning consultant, a professional speaker and a serial author... which probably explains why he's so exhausted! Some of his books are available here.