PR hacks: #Newsblur

Ok so it’s an inauspicious start when the site I planned to write about is currently down, but this is the exception rather than the rule.

If you work in PR, you have to keep track of lots of information flows from Google alerts to target publications and blogs. For much of this you can use RSS through a reader rather than letting your inbox take the strain, or manually browsing to sites. I look at about 700 feeds at last count.

Newsblur is an RSS reader, but its much smarter than its competition. It learns from you over time so that it filters out content you’re not interested in. In this respect alone it is worth the 24 dollars or so a year that it costs. In  addition to this, it provides you with a mix of views including allowing you to see the original post design within the reader, integrates social bookmarking services including my favourite – pinboard.in and has great mobile clients for a number of platforms including iOS, Android and even Maemo (that runs on Nokia’s highly desirable but unsupported N9 handset).

Finally in the same way that it is better to support good independent retailers rather than retail giants, there is also something good for the soul to buy your software from a small business rather than an international mega-corp (Newsblur is developer Samuel Clay and his dog Shiloh). The only downside being occasional outages…