Since RSS was introduced, the number of sites people are able to read increased substantially. Try these six methods to find more sites to subscribe to and fill in the reading gap.

1. Stick to good things

Let’s say someone you followed on twitter, or a coworker from work sent a link to a useful article in PDF format. PDF documents on the web are disconnected from the site they are published on. That is, there is no navigation menu to put you in context. When you get this kind of document, remove the end of that document’s URL and visit the site that published it. Usually, you will find more interesting things in there.

For example – I got to a document called “Best Practices for Political Advertising Online” while I was reading a post through my RSS reader. That was its original URL:

http://www.ipdi.org/UploadedFiles/BannerAdReport4.pdf

I removed all the right part and stayed with http://www.ipdi.org , where I found more great publications.

2. Web apps you’re already using

Some sites that you are already using will be happy to recommend you more good stuff, based on your current preferences. For example, if you are using Digg - look at the “upcoming” tab. There you will find recommendation of more posts and stories that diggers like you liked.

If you are using Google Reader, click “browse for stuff” in the left hand side menu and you’ll find other feeds recommendations (visit that section once in a while to find new stuff).

3. Aggregating sites

Sites like LifeHacker and many others (actually, most blogs) often review and recommend others’ posts. Now, let’s say you have just read a post on LifeHacker that you like. Look at the bottom of the post and you’ll see a link to the original post and blog. Go to that blog and look for more posts, and don’t forget to subscribe to its RSS feed. I often subscribe to blogs I find through aggregating sites without even reading other posts – I just assume that if they’ve written one good post – they will do it again.

4. Search Alerts

Various sites offer you to set up alerts for searches that interest you. Search.twitter.com, for example, enables you to subscribe to an RSS feed of your search query on twitter. Subscribe to cool queries in topics that interest you and you’ll find new sites recommendation from other twitter users.

For example, you can subscribe to this query:

“social media” great filter:links

From now on you will get twitts that have the words “social media” and “great” in them and also refer to a website.

Other sites that provide search alerts are – Google alerts and GoogleBlogSearch and Trackle.

5. Great sites’ blogroll

Blogroll is a list of links to other blogs and websites that the blog author recommends on. Visit the sites in the blogroll of your favorite sites and on their blogroll as well. Do that especially when you want to enter or learn about a specific niche. That way you will find the top sites and opinion leaders. Here is ProductiveWise’s blogroll:

6. Recommendation engine

Some sites where created especially to help you find more sites. Upload your excising RSS subscription list to SuggestRss, and it will analyze your feeds and suggest new ones. that’s how the results look like:

Have you got other ways to find great sites? feel free to share them with us in the comments.

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