By default, you get update notifications whenever a new post has been detected on any website in the listing. Sometimes you may want to get notified as soon as a select feed or type of feed gets updated. This can be done in RSSOwl, and here is how.

Start RSSOwl. You see your feeds and folders on the left and the feed contents on the right in the default layout.

To get notified when a specific feed or feeds in a folder get updated, do the following:

• Right-click the feed or the folder and select Filter News from the context menu.
• This opens the News Filter

You configure a new news filter in two steps. First you select one or multiple matching conditions. The easiest condition is match all, which configures the filter for all news that get posted in a feed or folder. It is possible to customize this, for instance by creating alerts for a specific program or service like Firefox, Opera or Gmail only.

The lower half is where you define the actions. RSSOwl supports two different kinds of notifications. You can show the news in the notifier or play a sound. I could not really get the notifier to work, but the play sound alert worked just fine. It played the selected sound whenever one or multiple new posts where detected in the selected feed or folder.

One of the things that you can do if you want to monitor multiple feeds this way is to assign different sounds to each alert to distinguish between the alerts.

If you want to dive deeper into news filters go here: How To Setup News Filters In RSS Reader RSSOwl

Are you using a Feed news reader? If so, have you configured alerts for specific news, or are you just going with the flow?

News agencies, however, can be slow to take up news stories, and getting information about natural disasters as they unfurl can be difficult. Cue the latest version of Earth Alerts, a free application produced by South Wind Technologies that has moved through development over the past few years to become a very respectable program. Not only does it allow you to review severe weather and similar events that may happen near you regularly, but it also allows you to survey events such as wildfires, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, landslides, and even volcanic eruptions with notifications as they occur.

Not only does the program provide a completely customizable experience through which users can set up local alerts as well as what types of national and global events they would like to be notified of, but it even provides photos of some such events. If you are the sort of person who really wants to be connected to the world, this application is not one to pass up.

Earth Alerts is a Windows-based application that allows you to monitor in near real-time a variety of natural hazard events that are occurring anywhere around the world. Alert notifications, reports, and imagery provide the user with a convenient way to view natural phenomenon as they occur, whether close to home or some far-flung corner of the globe!

Earth Alerts uses a variety of online resources provided by organizations such as the National Weather Service, U.S. Geological Survey and Smithsonian Institution (just to name a few), to identify what sort of activities “Mother Earth” is currently dishing out on the planet.

To use Earth Alerts, you simply select the specific natural hazards — earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, tropical cyclones, wildland fires, landslides, severe weather, local weather, etc. — and the locations that interest you. The application will then automatically retrieve the latest information from various live data feeds available on the Internet and present it to you in a convenient arrangement of reports, maps and images.

To get started, click on this link to download the program directly or click here to review the program’s website first. The program requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 and will run on any 32-bit or 64-bit editions of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 2000. Follow the automatic installer through its steps, and once the program is fully installed open it up. You should be greeted by a screen inviting you to set a U.S. location to call home.

At the bottom of the screen is a line of blue text that reads New Location – go ahead and give it a click. This will unlock the field in the middle of the screen titled LOCATION NAME. Add either the zip code or city and state of the location you would like to add and click enter. It will automatically pull up all relevant information about the location you have chosen. Simply click the blue text that reads Add Location to finalize the location.

You can add additional locations, which can be great if you like to keep track of severe weather or emergencies that may be affecting family members that live hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Just return to the settings section by clicking on the button in the lower left corner of the interface.

Spend some time searching through the different overviews in the navigation panel to the left and become familiar with the information they offer. Don’t forget to personalize how you are notified about natural events by clicking the different Notify buttons on the top of the Settings interface. Not only can you program Earth Alerts to notify you by text or email when events occur, but you can even program your computer to play noises when certain disasters strike.

Earth Alerts will update every ten minutes by default to make sure that you are alerted as soon as information about events become available. With this program, you can sit back and relax knowing that you will be one of the first to know when events occur – or maybe sit on the edge of your seat watching the events unfold.

One feature I love – as a budding full time blogger – is that I can hear my stories being dug, since it gives you a warm audio alert when such a happy thing happens. I can also see the list of people who dug my story, double clicking on their names will take me to their profile on Digg.

All this is presented in a great interface, nothing more, nothing less than needed. It resides in the system tray, consumes very little resources (4.000 K) and apart from giving me useful statistics about my stories, it is also fun, and fulfilling to watch the counter go up in real time.