Apr 26 2009
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Follow your own customized Google News on Twitter
Little tip for those of you who like me use Twitter as their main source for all kinds of information. You can use a customized Google News search to automatically post Tweets you can then follow. In my case I wanted to use Twitter to follow all news articles that somehow mention our University. This is how I did it:
- I created a Twitter user @duk_news for distributing the news tweets.
- I then went to Google News (in my case the Austrian one) and created a customized news search for “Donau-Uni Donau-Universität”. Austrian journalists tend to use two different names for our University, so I had to include both in the search.
- After I got the search results, I resorted them according to date. I am not completely sure if this is necessary, but it sounded like a good idea and worked.
- I then copied the RSS link on the (resorted) search results page und used this feed url with the twitterfeed service to connect it to the Twitter user @duk_news. The result can be seen at www.twitter.com/duk_news.
- Finally I started following @duk_news on Twitter.
This turned out surprisingly convenient. I now get news updates about my University (almost) as soon as they appear on the Web.
Update (July 2009): for some reason Twitterfeed started to have problems with the Google News RSS feed. If that happens to you, use the Google News RSS link with Feedburner and use the resulting Feedburner link with Twitterfeed.
