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Among my very favourite reads on the Internet, AddThis always has something worth reading:

Tip 6: Freshen Up Your Feed

Brainstorm new types of content you haven’t tried in the past as a way to drive more engagement and reach new users via your social channels.

Here are some ideas to freshen your feed and boost engagement:&hellips;

I’d like to expand on this excellent bit of advice. Yes, you need to find ways to spark new creativity into your daily content. But let me suggest that another “feed” you need to refresh: the feed you feed your head. Spring is a great time to make sure that the things that are supposed to be inspiring you actually are:

RSS Feeds

This is a dying avenue, I know. But for those of you who, like me, cannot quite let go of your well-honed RSS feeds, now is the moment to undertake the grim work of seeing who’s news feeds have gone silent while you’ve been sleeping.

Other sites simply do not contribute the quality of content they once did. Just page after page of uninteresting promotions and grants. Gone is the excitement of the latest discovery. Even the discoveries aren’t written of with any enthusiasm.

Twitter Lists

Among the Eureka moments in my career as a social media personality was the moment I discovered the power of Twitter’s lists. Creating lists of accounts that you see as having a common bond – local feeds, topic feeds, influencer feeds – is a great way to survey an important component of your social network in-context. It is this ability to interact with your networks in such specific ways that I maintain is why content on Twitter is consistently better quality – even as compared to other social feeds of the same agent.

But people move on and feeds become less relevant than they promised to be. It’s not personal: yours may not be so hot, either. But spring may be time to start taking a long look at those accounts that are just taking up space on your lists.

The “Daily Scroll”:

We’ve all got one: that list of websites that, even when we know there won’t be more content, we still end up checking in bored moments throughout the day. Is yours working for you, or can you add some new stuff?

I’ve recently become fascinated by one of the most cerebral science news and thoughts sites I’ve ever read, Nautilus:

Could these people’s immune systems be converging because their microbiomes are adapting to their shared environment? The immune system must maintain a relationship with friendly microbes to keep them straight from the bad ones, so if partners are exposed to similar bacteria and viruses, that exposure could make their populations of immune cells more similar. The researchers point out that it’s already known that couples who live together have more similar microbiomes than strangers do, perhaps because they swap bacteria with each other or share lifestyle choices like smoking or drinking. “Some of these factors are likely to be even more shared after children,” says Adrian Liston, the senior author and a professor at University of Leuven in Belgium. “For example, children are likely to increase the exchange of gut bacteria by reducing the sterility of the household (to put it nicely).”

On top of fabulously-gross biology articles such as this one, Nautilus continues to surprise in it’s ability to describe the cutting edge of science in an understandable and engaging way without pandering to simple “wisdom.”

But other sites with whom I have “frequent flier miles” aren’t as inspiring right now. Maybe the core content has strayed from its mission, or just isn’t as sharp as it used to be. It may be time to move on.

It’s not personal, it’s inspiration:

A big part of me worries when I stop following someone. It’s silly, but it’s true. I know my support is just one set of eyeballs, but when content gets stale and I decide I need to move on, it feels like I’m letting someone down. Self-important, much?

But losing audience members has never been the end of the road for my writing career. It hurts, but only because you know you’re not inspiring people like you once did. But the answer to that is not to look on your former viewers with disappointment, but to look on their departure as a signal. The signal is: it’s time to get relevant, again.

Since they announced the new Bundles earlier this week, I haven’t had a chance to really get into what they were. But today, I took the Bundles for a spin and really like what I’m seeing!

Bit.ly Bundles basically allow you to link blog directly through their website, which is really nice when you consider how much Twitter users such as myself use bit.ly to shorten the links we’re already link-blogging on Twitter. Using Bundles, we can take the most interesting, most clicked-on, or most relevant of the links we created for the day and make a bundle out of them. You can also just create a bundle naturally.

The Bundles lead to all kinds of other potential possibilities that I’m hoping bit.ly developers are considering, many of which are tied to the statistics and analysis I’ve been hoping they will implement. This are not limited to, but include:

  • Generating a Bundle based on the most-clicked links for the day/week/month/year
  • Generating a Bundle based on exclusively-linked content (stuff you’ve linked to that no one else has. Better still if you can get the most popular exclusive content!)
  • “Automatically add to Bundle” option to allow you to always create daily bundles, whether or not they get published.
  • “Add to bundle” option for any link, rather than the current check-and-create, which is limiting.
  • Seems like, if you can create these on-the-fly Bundle “link blogs,” the same aught to be possible for custom domains: give us the option to display our links on our custom shortening domains in a similar fashion to the Bundles. That would rock!

All in all, Bundles have some really awesome potential for the future and I really hope the bit.ly folks keep working along these lines!