It is time for a stroll down productivity lane, HPL style. Being an aspiring technologist you undoubtedly keep you ear close to those news wires. But with stories flying around at the speed of light these days, it can be hard to keep up the myriad of news sources and blogs. Lucky for you there is a great solution that will allow you to scan the headlines in seconds instead of minutes or more.

By now you have probably heard of RSS feeds. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and allows websites to beam their content out to readers without the reader having to actually go to the site itself. RSS aggregators like RSSBandit, FeedReader or Bloglines will grab all the stories from any given source you assign to them and they are downloaded onto your computer for your perusal. This is a great technolog...but if you subscribe to lots of feeds like me, pretty soon your aggregator is dropping hundreds if not thousands of stories on you every day defeating its productive purpose.

Luckily our friends over at the open source project of the century, Firefox, have been kind enough to take this technology a step further. (If you don't know what Firefox is, first I offer you my apologies and second I command you to go download it and start using this class leading browser immediately.) These folks have introduced the concept of Live Bookmarks which take RSS feeds a step further.

A Live Bookmark will scan your favorite RSS feeds in real time and stuff all those headlines into a little bookmark that changes as quickly as the content. It is updated continuously (so long as you internet connection remains viable) without you having to do anything. You save time because it pulls headlines from all your favorites sources together at your fingertips without you having to go through each story on an RSS aggregator. All you do is point to the dynamically generated set of links inside of the live bookmark and it will connect you directly to the exact story you wanted to see. Intrigued??? I will walk you through the easy breezy setup.

Adding Live Bookmarks works just adding normal bookmarks to your browser with a little twist. Firefox dynamically recognizes which sites have RSS feeds and generates a little orange RSS icon inside the address bar of the browser itself.

Simply click the icon and a window asking you to add the bookmark to your browser will pop up.

After you click yes, the Live Bookmark is now a part of your browser environment. It will dynamically grab all the headlines from you favorite news sites and blogs like the HPL (and yes we do have Live Bookmarking enabled).

As time passes and you get more comfortable with this technology you will see how powerful it can be. Take a look at how I have customized my browser...

Now you see how I can scan literally thousands of headlines in under a minute with one mouse click - not too shabby?