Resources of the Week: Quality Business RSS Feeds
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

Business information was a high interest item on both ResourceShelf and DocuTicker even before the dog days of the global financial crisis. We use RSS to monitor high-value sources for items of interest to post on both sites. Here are five of our favorite feeds; some you may already know about, but we think you’ll find a couple unique ones here.

1. Harvard Business School Working Knowledge — A steady source of high-quality working papers, interviews with professors about their current research and articles of general business interest, such as:

• The Surprisingly Successful Marriages of Multinationals and Social Brands
• Marketing Your Way Through a Recession
• Achieving Excellence in Nonprofits

If you work with business information, it’s well worth monitoring the feeds of other leading business school publications, such as the “Knowledge@” series:

• Knowledge@Wharton
• Knowledge@Emory
• Knowledge@W.P. Carey

Those interested in the hospitality industry might want to explore the feeds available from Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration.

2. Large international consulting firms like Deloitte, Ernst & Young, and PriceWaterhouseCoopers offer a surprisingly large amount of high-quality reports, podcasts/webcasts and other resources — at no cost. Free registration is usually required.

3. USA.gov aggregates a nice collection of business/economics feeds from federal agencies. One you may otherwise overlook — the “What’s New” feed from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service — Yes, it’s about agricultural prices, but this agency also publishes data and reports of more general interest. A few recent examples:

• Rising Food Prices Take a Bite Out of Food Stamp Benefits
• Behavioral Economic Concepts To Encourage Healthy Eating in School Cafeterias: Experiments and Lessons From College Students
• Household Food Security in the United States, 2007

The feeds from the different Federal Reserve System banks are worth a close look, since they focus on economic conditions in a given geographic area. (Sometimes you may have to hunt around the websites for the feeds.) I regularly follow the Atlanta Fed (because I live in the southeast) and the New York Fed (because it generates some awesome stuff, such as Dynamic Maps of Bank Card and Mortgage Delinquencies in the United States and Dynamic Maps of Nonprime Mortgage Conditions in the United States).

4. If you want to keep up with business and economics in the European Union, you can pick through the large selection of EU feeds and find the ones that interest you — such as Enterprise and industry, Transport, Information society and media, Economic and monetary affairs, Financial programming and budget, and many more, including feed from individual agencies.

For the UK — Scott Vine, Senior Information Officer at Clifford Chance, a UK law firm, maintains a blog called Informationoverlord. On this blog, I found a large, detailed collection of feeds extracted from “all the bodies listed as ‘Central government departments, executive agencies and non-departmental public bodies’ on DirectGov” — the UK equivalent of USA.gov. Pick and choose according to your specific interests. (This resource was posted to the blog last August, so be aware that “stuff” may have moved.)

For Canada — The Government of Canada’s News Centre offers a large RSS feed collection. These are organized into categories:
News by Audience (which includes a business-specific feed), News by Province, and News by Government of Canada organization.

For Australia — Check the Australian Government RSS Feed and Podcast Index. Most of the business-oriented feeds are offered by business.gov.au. Also worth checking: Austrade and the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

For New Zealand — Check the selection of feeds on the official government website, Beehive. Scroll down to the “By portfolio” section for topical feeds.

See Also: A collection of government RSS feeds from many nations. Compiled and maintained by Scott Vine who also compiles a detailed list of UK feeds (see above).

This entry was posted on Monday, January 5th, 2009 at 2:54 am and is filed under Business and Economics, RSS, Resource of the Week, Source File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.