Custom News Section Created

Wikipedia calls Writer’s Block “a condition, associated with writing as a profession, in which an author loses the ability to produce new work. The condition varies widely in intensity. It can be trivial, a temporary difficulty in dealing with the task in hand. At the other extreme, some ‘blocked’ writers have been unable to work for years on end, and some have even abandoned their careers.”

One could argue that the blogging equivalent could be called Blogger’s Block.

We’ve all encountered it at one point or another.  Fatigue (mental or physical), focus directed elsewhere (family or work), or just not in the mood.  Sometimes we can fight through it; sometimes not.  In the past, I’ve written about Google Reader as a convenient tool for keeping track of all the blogs you wish to follow on a regular basis. Setting it to show just the new posts is an excellent way to spoon-feed yourself with the new content posted by your favorite bloggers.  More to the point of this post, it also provides for a “sampler” of topics. This sampler could be the tool to jog your memory and inspire you to break through “Blogger’s Block.”

But there is another Google tool (go figure) that can act as another Blogger’s Blog Jogger: Google News. If you’ve ever clicked there from Google’s main page, you know the collection of news stories in a number of categories that is updated constantly. In one way, this information overload does nothing for inspiring me for a topic.

Unless I use some of its features.

Custom News Section Displayed

Google News allows you to create a Custom News Section for any search term so that you can display a custom view with news stories on your topic of choice. For example, another blog of mine called Energication, I blog about renewable energy and its implications for K-12 education. As part of that, I have a specific interest in plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. So, I have created a Custom News Section for PHEV. Now, I simply click on my PHEV collection and have the current and most relevant news stories served up on plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.

You can set up any number of Custom News Sections based on the subjects in which you are most interested. What I like about this approach to creativity is that while reading other blogs is enjoyable, reading other’s work applies their “lenses” to the topic.  My viewing more “neutral” news stories, I get to see the topic through the eyes of the reporter.  A very different perspective.  Sometimes, just a certain collection of topic titles gets my attention, allowing me to get on a horse about some issue.

It’s very easy to use.  Simply enter a search term in your Google News view. When your custom page is displayed, click on the link at the bottom of the page to “Add a custom section for [search term] to Google News.”

Creativity, perspectives, insights – and the tools to foster all of them – is the combination that makes for effective blogging.

I hope you find this useful.

Dave