With the amount of information published daily, it can seem nearly impossible to “stay current” in your field of study and find the time to write, teach, or conduct research. Periodic Internet searches, Google alerts, and scholarly databases make the process a bit easier, but the massive result sets on a single search phrase can be overwhelming.

What if there were a way to stay current on the topics you’re most interested in, from sources you trust and others you hadn’t yet heard of, without the time and effort of endless searching?

The good news is, there is! It’s the Artificial-Intelligence(AI)-driven tool, Feedly.

With Feedly, you can quickly follow topics of interest from eleven types of sources including research journals, blogs, trade publications, podcasts, Twitter, YouTube, and more. Using the AI-driven discovery tool, you can collect content from your favorite sources and discover new ones quickly. Add sources relevant to your research agenda to categorized feeds and Feedly will monitor them for new content regularly.

Based on my interests, I have feeds for Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Marketing, and (of course) Writing in my Feedly account. The categorized and chronological grouping of the results makes it easy to focus on specific content without weeding through irrelevant results.

In fact, this is my “go to” source for curating each week’s Most Useful Textbook & Academic Posts of the Week article on TAA’s blog, Abstract. Rather than being limited to a small pool of sites that I have the time to visit and search for new articles of interest to our members, I add those sites and others to my Writing feed, let Feedly collect the links to all the new content, and then I search those results for the items seemingly most beneficial to our audience.

While it doesn’t write the article for me, or discern which items are “most useful”, it does handle the time-consuming work of filtering content, searching multiple sources, and curating the results into an easy to digest format.

Paid subscription options open additional filtering and automation capabilities through a personal AI research assistant they call Leo that can prioritize certain topics, eliminate duplicate results, remove content based on keywords, and even summarize long articles automatically.

Feed your research agenda with Feedly and save time searching so you can spend more time writing.

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Eric Schmieder is the Membership Marketing Manager for TAA. He has taught computer technology concepts to curriculum, continuing education, and corporate training students since 2001. A lifelong learner, teacher, and textbook author, Eric seeks to use technology in ways that improve results in his daily processes and in the lives of those he serves. His latest textbook, Web, Database, and Programming: A foundational approach to data-driven application development using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, MySQL, and PHP, First Edition, is available now through Sentia Publishing.