How To Discover and Organize Vital Fantasy Baseball Information: The 4 Step System
This system has given me a massive advantage on my competition, and I hope you find it as valuable.
This article is written–under the assumption–you’re already familiar with using a feed reader. If not, you can find a detailed explanation of how to subscribe to blogs, and use a Feed Reader here.
THE SYSTEM:
1. Del.icio.us Bookmarking
If you don’t have a delicious account, you can make one here. (It’s a simple User/Pass/Email with no spam and free) Make sure to install the delicious toolbar on your web browser.
Short video explanation of Del.icio.us:
Here’s how to use Del.icio.us to filter out junk, and store vital information:
- When you’re going through your feed reader, and you find something important, simply “tag” the content with the name “to_read” by clicking the “delicious” tag on your browser.
- You can quickly go through a days worth of updates this way, storing important and relevant information. This functionality is important when you are subscribed to many blogs and news sites. And as a fantasy baseball manager you should be subscribed to many resources.
- When you are done bookmarking your information with the tag “to_read”, close out your feed reader.
- Go to your delicious bookmark page, and read the content from your bookmark page. This will save you a lot of time; plus, it will keep information important to you consolidated in one place.
Next step…
Integrating the power of Stumble Upon:
Here’s a short video about Stumble Upon: (turn up the volume for this video)
Now go make a Stumble Upon account by clicking here. (just enter a name/email/pass no spam and it’s free)
The video explains how awesome the tool is, but I’m going to show you how to use it specifically for finding new content.
Here’s how to discover hidden gems with Stumble Upon:
- Once you have a Stumble Upon account, and the toolbar installed, the only buttons you’ll need are “Thumb Up”, “Thumb Down”, & “Stumble”
- Now when you visit the content you tagged with Del.icio.us, simply vote a thumbs up by clicking the thumbs up icon on the Stumble Upon Toolbar.
Essentially what you are doing is telling the Stumble Upon system that you want to find content like this in the future. The more you vote, the smarter the algorithm gets.
Here’s the 4 step system in review:
- You find a blog/site you like (I recommended 101 good baseball blogs here.) You subscribe to those blogs/sites with your feed reader.
- You receive many daily updates in your feed reader. To filter through all of the updates; you use the delicious bookmarking tool to tag important information with the tag “to_read”
- You use Stumble Upon to vote on content you stored in delicious by clicking the thumbs up button on the Stumble Toolbar.
- After voting on content with Stumble Upon the system will began to learn about the types of content that is important to you. Then all you have to do is click the “stumble” button on the toolbar, and the system will launch you to new fantasy baseball content.
I’ve found many quality resources with this system. Pretty cool..eh?
If you have any questions, I’d be more than happy to answer them in the comments.
Queue the guys from the Guiness commercial (brilliant!).
You can also do these things with Google’s Bookmarks and Google Reader. Without Google Reader, I don’t know how I’d keep up with all the Fantasy Baseball sites. Also, using a feed reader enables you to bypass a lot of filtering software big companies use to try to get you to work instead of surfing the web!
Can you clarify for me the differences between del.icio.us and bloglines? It seems del.icio.us has the social bookmarking aspect and the tagging that bloglines does not. The function of Bloglines (which you tipped me off to, thank you) has been very helpful with one minor gripe.
If a site has many entries to review in my feeder and I decide the summary is interesting for only a couple but not enough time then to read the couple interesting ones they drop out of your feeder. I figure I just don’t know how to save them for later reading. Can you help?
Also, are you suggesting that del.icio.us is an upgrade over bloglines? If so, why? Thanks.
Bill,
del.icio.us simply allows you to bookmark the content you like, that you read in your feed reader.
Lets paint a scenario…
You open up bloglines and you click on “brock for broglio” to read the latest update.
Say you have 50 other feeds that have updates as well.
You can use Delicious to bookmark content you really like.
Delicious is a web based bookmarking service.
Bloglines is a feed reader only.
Delicious isn’t better than bloglines. They’re services that should be used together.
—————-
And to your other question….
There’s an option in bloglines where you can use a drop down menu to view all posts from up to a week, month, year.. etc inside the feed.
So say you open up bloglines, and you click a post, then click out of it. you can simply use the drop down arrow inside the feed and have bloglines show you updates from that feed going as far back as you want.
Hope this helps.
If not, please continue to ask questions, so that other readers can follow that probably have similar questions.
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