Pharma Strategy Blog

Recently, I was talking with a client about how we use social media for competitive intelligence gathering and the importance of aggregating RSS feeds from blogs, alerts, newswires and journals etc to create a living database that can be searched for useful information.  The data gathered can be used for market surveillance and landscape opportunity assessments.  I showed them some snippets based on their area of interest and thankfully, it produced some useful information they didn't know.  They seemed suitably impressed.

As the conversation continued, we discussed the value of continuous learning and how we get smarter by reading great blogs from other people.  Then I got floored with a neat question; "which blogs do you actually read every day and enjoy?"

This brings me to the topic of this weeks Friday afternoon fun – putting other people in spotlight.

Although I aggregate a lot of feeds, I don't actually read them all and instead use them for search purposes.  On my Mac Mail, however, is a nifty feature that allows me to import RSS feeds of blogs I enjoy reading daily, like this:

As new blogs are posted, a number to the right indicates how many are unread.  This makes it easier to track new posts.

I also use the Notes feature above the RSS to jot quick thoughts and ideas to myself around things I find interesting.  These are synced with my iPhone and important topics I also email to my Evernote database partly as a backup and partly because I also use its awesome search features in conjunction with the RSS search.

So, what do I read daily?  An eclectic mix from science, medicine, tech, finance, economics, food and of course, pharma and biotech.  This list is continually refined with new ones added and old ones deleted.  For me, though, they're interesting and thoughtful people and I learn a lot from smarter people who take the time to think and write about a wide range of things.

Check them out, you may find some new ones you like too.