I'm a day late on day two of my 'improve this blog' project, but I'm confident I'll catch up this evening. I'm in Boston with my daughter helping her move into her first apartment. After I finish this we have to start scrubbing several years of dust off her lovely hardwood floors.

How to sip from the firehose of online news 

I love blogging about current events, but we have so many news channels now, it can be challenging to scan them for tidbits to share. Dumping everything you find into a news reader just leads to a chaotic overflow. These are the news aggregators I've come to rely upon:

1. CEO Express is actually a business portal that allows you to set up pages and pages of feeds just like Google Reader. Unlike GR, CE suggests the world's most popular business new resources. It's well worth $60 a year, and the first year is only $30.
2. Twitter Times plugs into your Twitter feed and shows you the links that have been shared over the previous day. In most cases you get much more information about the link to decide if you need to visit it. Even if you don't participate in the conversation on Twitter, this is a great way to use Twitter as a news feed. Just follow the people whose opinions you value.
3. Extra Texture is a service of Tim Manners' Reveries online marketing magazine. His staff scans dozens of business and marketing news publications and posts the links to news items with a one-line description. Great way to track trends.
4. Marketing & Strategy Innovation aggregates the best marketing bloggers. Published by FutureLab, it's a great way to keep up with thought leadership.
5. Mediapost's Marketing Daily is my favorite of the dozens of newsletters published by Mediapost. They also run an online community for marketing professionals. In contrast to MarketingProfs, membership is free and their perspective is much broader.

So now you have some tools for keeping up with business and marketing news. I recommend a combination of bookmarks, newsletters and news feeds. It's more stimulating than facing a stuffed email box every morning, or finding your newsreader backed up.