For financial advisors who like to keep one eye on the news and the other on their sales, keeping up with today’s torrent of information is getting tougher. That’s where emerging technology called “really simple syndication” feeds, or RSS feeds, can give you a big leg up.

Thanks to RSS technology, which is easy to use and usually free, you can customize the daily flow of information you receive from the Web. Instead of surfing 40 Web sites for news about renewable energy to serve your ethical investor base better, for example, you can have all the news dropped into a customized program. It is even possible to prioritize and filter the results.

How does this work? It all hinges on the computer code of RSS feeds, which was developed to allow Web sites to transmit information about a site’s content rather than displaying the content itself for viewing. To get itself noticed, a Web site can publish an RSS feed — usually a list of highly abbreviated headlines or topics — explaining what content it currently has available.

If you subscribe to that feed in a format known as an “RSS news reader program,” the news reader software will interpret the contents of the feed, showing you a listing of the Web site’s latest headlines. Clicking on a headline will give you either a short description of the relevant article and a link to the original site or display the text of the article in full.

A variety of RSS news reader programs are available, and many are free. There are two broad types: off-line and online.

> Offline. The industry began with offline readers, which are applications designed for desktop computers and are similar to e-mail programs. Generally, on the left-hand side of the screen, you will see a collection of feeds offered by different sites, with each one typically organized into folders. An advisor following renewable energy might create folders such as “solar,” “wind” and “geothermal,” for example.

On the right-hand side of the screen, you’ll generally see a number of possible views, depending on which you select, displaying the headlines for the relevant folder or feed. A newspaper-style view might show you headlines from a selection of feeds within a folder, or you may see a list of headlines pertaining to a single feed.

Subscribing to a feed can be as easy as clicking on a “subscribe” button on a Web page. Many Web pages will have a small icon representing an RSS feed that can be dragged into your RSS news reader. The news reader will recognize the feed and immediately subscribe, drawing all of the site’s headlines into its list of news items.

For PC users, advisors could do worse than Feed Demon, which is an offline reader program from Denver-based Newsgator. There are a variety of alternatives, including RSS Bandit, or SharpReader.

> Online. Readers started off being offline applications but quickly moved online. The advantage of an online reader: you can access your news anywhere.

Mountainview, Calif.-based Google offers its Google Reader application, while Campbell, Calif.-based Bloglines, owned by Oakland-based IAC Search & Media, also offers an online browser-like experience. Newsgator also offers an online browser.

If you’re confused about Newsgator offering both an off-line and an online reader, there’s a good reason: it is one of the few companies using a hybrid model for news readers, giving people the flexibility and extra functionality of an offline reader while maintaining an online account.

The advantage of using a hybrid system is twofold. First, you can access your news either from your desktop PC at work or from an Internet café and see the same feeds. Second, if you have Newsgator’s software installed on two PCs (say, at work and at home), the software can use the online account to synchronize your feeds. News items marked as “read” on one PC will automatically be updated as “read” on the other, so you never have to go over the same news twice.

The other advantage of using a reader with an online account is that a cellphone version of the reader is often available. Many online readers are now offering Web pages custom-designed for cellphones, including the iPhone and others. Some also offer applications for the iPhone that are designed to hook into online accounts. Newsgator offers an iPhone version of NetNewsWire, its Mac application, for the iPhone.

@page_break@Drinking from the Internet’s information firehose requires a different approach to reading news. It’s a mistake to treat news feeds like e-mail. Many people plod through messages, carefully considering each item in sequence. Experts such as Dave Winer (the software developer who invented RSS) instead propose a “sushi conveyor belt” approach. Don’t try to savour each individual news item in your list of feeds, or you’ll end up awash in partially relevant information. Instead, concern yourself only with the items that look appetizing.

But how can you filter those RSS feeds in the first place? Most good readers will give you the option to search and filter within your base of feeds for news items containing particular keywords.

Another way to tailor your feeds specifically to your own needs is to create custom ones for specific search terms. Blogdigger is a blog-focused search engine that lets you create a custom RSS feed from the search terms you use. If you’re following 30 companies, say, then creating search feeds for these firms will drop much of what is said about them online in the “blogosphere” (the large collection of RSS-enbabled Web sites online) into your news reader program. That could include news, announcements, opinion and gossip.

In an industry as information-intensive as financial services, RSS news readers should be mandatory. Otherwise, you will be missing what other advisors are seeing. Setting this system up will be the most valuable 30 minutes you ever spend. IE