How do you keep up with the latest, greatest, and most updated news on the net? To help you be more effective with trends, news, ministry ideas, etc, I’ve decided to try to help out with some tools for you.

In case you’re not aware, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has really caught on. Most (all?) blogs are able to syndicate their feeds. Not only that, many websites syndicate their news articles. The trick is finding and collecting all those feeds into one place where you can monitor them all easier.

There are a couple ways you can collect (or subscribe) to these RSS (aka: XML or Atom) as well as there are free and not free ways to get them. You’ll have to hunt around, but I do have some free recommendations.

You could get the latest headlines syndicated in your email client (like Outlook) and your browser (like Internet Explorer or Firefox). I have not used these so I can’t comment on them. I just wanted you to know they are available.

There are two other ways that I use that I can recommend to you. One is an application you download onto your computer. I recommend Sharpreader. It’s a breeze to setup and easy to manage and organize your subscriptions.

Another way is to create a customized webpage that has them all. One I’ve recently played with is Bloglines. One cool thing about it is you can let other people see what you’ve subscribed to. Another that I’m a big fan of is my.yahoo.com. You can add any RSS feed to it…plus you can add other content like sports scores, weather, etc.

I’ve written about syndication before so feel free to check it out.

While you’re out reading stuff, check out this from the TallSkinnyKiwi and Micro Persuasion. They both have some great tips about this stuff.

Be effective by staying on top of what’s new.