I’ve been a long-time user of Google Alerts to help me track internet mentions of anything work-related like “Recomendo”. Google Alerts are free and easy to set up, and every week I get an email digest of new results. And if you’re a paying customer of Feedly Pro like me, you can fine-tune your keyword searches to get real-time alerts and create your own custom newsroom. These Feedly tips will help you refine your keyword searches, discover more results and weed out whatever is irrelevant. — CD

A free newsletter I find valuable is Exploding Topics. The weekly emails spotlights about 5 words or phrases that are quickly rising in popularity among web searches and social media mentions. The terms might be a product, a company name, a bit of slang, a Millennial catch phrase. It’s a nice easy way to track what’s rapidly trending. (Explanations of the trends are included in the newsletter but not the website.)  - KK

My two favorite sources for what’s happening in China are these two blogs. Say I want to know, what are Chinese youth watching, reading or listening to? SupChina is a big sprawling website with axillary podcasts and newsletters, that comprehensively covers China’s culture and politics. Based in NYC, it’s slick and professional. Sixth Tone is a smaller publication based in Shanghai, a slower rate, often deeper pieces, more off-beat and less headline-driven. Both give me a good pulse of a rising China and can be subscribed to via RSS. — KK

Here is where I go to counter pessimism. Every day, one piece of good news, made graphically beautiful, is served up by Beautiful News Daily. Available on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, RSS feed, and the web. It’s like breathing pure oxygen. — KK

I get a bunch of email newsletters but the only one I pay for is News Items. Every week day the one-person wizard behind News Items, John Ellis, delivers a dozen brief paragraphs of global news summarized from 75 uncommon sources, including many behind pay walls. New Items is much more global, more high level, and much more succinct (two pages at most) than any newspaper in the world. It’s $90 per year, and there is a free abbreviated version. — KK

I limit my Twitter use to less than 5 minutes a day which doesn’t leave much time to browse and discover new things, so a newsletter I look forward to is “Really Good Questions” which links you to the best asked questions on Twitter and answer thread. An example of a really good question is Sam Altman’s “What advice seems obviously right, is relatively easy to follow, and is usually ignored?” I really liked @KristyT’s response: “The best way to produce good outcomes is dealing with reality the way it actually is versus what you want it to be.” This newsletter is a side project by Sharath Kuruganty so issues are infrequent, but here you can find the threads he’s collected so far. — CD

I’m frequently on the lookout for new newsletters and I found Letterlist to be a great website to discover interesting new content. You can browse their curated collection of newsletters for free, but if you sign up (also free) you can subscribe to the ones you want with their 1-click button instead of having to type out your email address over and over again. — CD

Slowly working on this piece of advice: “Unfollow IG models and influencers. Start following artists and designers. Your entire outlook on life will change.” Found this in my weekly Unreadit newsletter: Self Improvement. The curators of Unreadit pull all the best content from related subreddits and send you an email once a week. I’ve spent zero hours rummaging through Reddit in the last month because of this. — CD

If you have an iPhone, Narwhal is the best app to access Reddit. It’s snappy, and highly customizable and much easier to use than Reddit’s own app. — MF

I began the year with a purging of accounts I no longer use like Facebook, Snapchat and LinkedIn. This Consumer Reports article has direct links to Delete Account pages for the major platforms. It spared me the hassle of navigating through settings in search of a delete button. — CD

I’ve been slowly weaning myself off Facebook. I still type it into my browser on autopilot, but now instead of getting lost in the bottomless feed, this chrome extension replaces it with a random quote. The quotes are repetitive, but you can add your own. Even so, I’m sure this helps my mental health in some way. — CD

I’ve become of a fan of Inside newsletters. Once a day I get a brief summary of what’s been reported in a narrow specialized field, like AI, or VR, or Space, or Robotics. Succinct, select, in depth, and free. Inside also offers newsletters focused on each of the big tech companies, like Amazon or Google. And they now offer inside industry news on fashionable sectors like Cannabis or Beer. – KK

None of us have as many followers as we think we do. Up to half may be bots or shills. Every now and then I give myself a reality check by seeing how many fake followers I have on Twitter. I enter my twitter handle into SparkToro. Ouch, 21% are fake. — KK

When you sign up for Nextdoor it’s like instantly joining your neighborhood watch group. Plus you get local business recommendations from neighbors, classifieds and events. — CD 

Reddit’s “Futurology” subreddit features news stories that point to our future. Stories such as “New antibiotic found in human nose,” “Singapore Scientists Grow Mini Human Brains,” and “Should a human-pig chimera be treated as a person?” I visit it daily. — MF 

This no-graphics version of CNN’s website looks like the web circa 1993, and I love it. I think they should run a couple of text ads to monetize it, because I don’t want them to stop. — MF

Smartnews is a free, lightweight, mobile app for iOS and Android. It presents the top news stories in different categories and is updated frequently. You can add your favorite news sites to it, too. When I want to find out what’s going on, it’s the first place I go. — MF

I’ve come to appreciate blogs more and more. They are reliable sources of informed enthusiasm and news that stays new. I’ve been surprised how few people use a RSS reader to subscribe to their select choices of blogs because a great RSS reader like Feedly is a tool I use every day. With Feedly, I can read the newest posts of any blog I subscribe to on my laptop or phone in a smooth, intelligent form. It is MUCH easier to read a blog on RSS than it is to go to the website, and it also strips away all ads and other marginalia, so I only see the core text and images. Feedly isn’t the only RSS reader, but it’s stable and highly evolved and I love it. — KK 

More people should know about Nuzzel. It’s the sane and efficient way I consume social media without having to read it. Nuzzel displays the six most recommended links each day among all the people I follow on social media. So instead of reading those endless feeds, I read my one page Nuzzel digest and get the six best articles that are most read by my friends. — KK

Every day I get the entire internet compressed into a single page. My first stop is Hvper, which is a super aggregator that collects the top headlines of every news source out there into ONE single page. I see what’s at the top of mind in the both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, plus HuffPo and Fox News, plus Al Jazeera and the Drudge Report. Plus Reddit, Digg, BuzzNews, Twitter, CNN, ABC, Verge, Wired, and on and on. All of it! The whole news media landscape in a one-page dashboard. Each headline is clickable directly to the source. It is fast, clean (no ads!), free and magical. Must read. — KK