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Of Switchboards and Syndication
Aug. 1st, 2012 02:40 pmAs an infovore, one of my biggest difficulties is prioritizing the information that I need for daily decision making. I receive and digest about 150 new articles a day from 154 separate news feeds (after several pruning passes). When I balance that against the social overhead of IRC, Email, Twitter, Google Plus, LiveJournal, and Dreamwidth, plus my reading and study buffers, that's a massive undertaking.
It probably comes as no surprise, then, that I simply don't read it all. Instead, I employ several heuristics to help me prioritize, in the form of rules that make reading less choreful and more pleasant to read and respond to.
From a high level, the system is very simple. I deploy two components: one to notify immediately when someone contacts me over any medium (pushing all notifications to my iPhone), and a second that packages up only the important parts and sends them to me each morning. It works quite well, and it deliberately skips the memetic trivia of he-said-she-said-cat-video that bogs down so much of social media.
The best part of the second category is running my own personal newspaper. I make liberal use of Calibre Periodicals and Yahoo Pipes to automatically send things to my Kindle every morning at 8AM, and then carry that around with me and to read over the rest of the day. It's gloriously simple, and it pars things down to just my interests, which I supplement with The News (I use the Seattle Times) in a separate periodical.
For the nosy, here's a selection of what I download daily, ordered by section number:
(Notable bits that are missing: Reddit (I use an official client instead), private entries for LiveJournal (ditto), and Dreamwidth reading (I use the web interface occasionally).
It all ends up nicely syndicated into a Kindle newspaper that I can download from my bedside and start reading in the morning. And I enjoy that; it gives me a start to what's going on in the world, without making me feel overwhelmed.
What do you read daily, and how do you make it work for you? I'm curious.
It probably comes as no surprise, then, that I simply don't read it all. Instead, I employ several heuristics to help me prioritize, in the form of rules that make reading less choreful and more pleasant to read and respond to.
From a high level, the system is very simple. I deploy two components: one to notify immediately when someone contacts me over any medium (pushing all notifications to my iPhone), and a second that packages up only the important parts and sends them to me each morning. It works quite well, and it deliberately skips the memetic trivia of he-said-she-said-cat-video that bogs down so much of social media.
The best part of the second category is running my own personal newspaper. I make liberal use of Calibre Periodicals and Yahoo Pipes to automatically send things to my Kindle every morning at 8AM, and then carry that around with me and to read over the rest of the day. It's gloriously simple, and it pars things down to just my interests, which I supplement with The News (I use the Seattle Times) in a separate periodical.
For the nosy, here's a selection of what I download daily, ordered by section number:
- Sythyry's Journal
Really, can you argue with the musings of a little blue lizard wizard? I certainly can't, and I'm sure xir translator,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bard_bloom, would agree. Oh, but this will be switching protagonists soon. - LiveJournal Friends Feed
Public posts from my friends on LJ. Note this version doesn't actually include my account name, but it's obvious if you're reading here! - Coding Horror
Jeff Atwood is simply inspiring and wonderful. If you're even vaguely interested in how computer programming works, read him. - Everything2 Cool Archive
A wonderful little feed from a proto-Wikipedia. E2 continues to provide random inspiration, because its noders are literate, insightful, and surprisingly comprehensive. - Fark
For when I just need to laugh at the world. - Slashdot.org
Bad summaries for tech news start here. Slashdot remains useful for figuring out what the rumor mill is talking about, though http://news.ycombinator.com/ is better if you like the nuts and bolts instead. I keep both. - The Consumerist
Retail and service provider PSAs, with the occasional (and blessedly skippable) cat thread. - GrokLaw
Once dedicated almost exclusively to SCO v. Novell, GrokLaw is still one of the best sources for interesting tech legal news. (Good luck, Samsung. Sincerely.) - The Volokh Conspiracy
And for all other interesting legal happenings in the US, I read here. - Daily MTG
Article feed for the latest happenings with Magic: The Gathering. This is basically a puzzle feed for me, because the metagame is just so combinatorially interesting. - Nintendo Life
I'm also a Nintendo fanboy. My first game console was an NES, so I suppose my experience has been tinted slightly. - Futility Closet
A daily selection of historical curiosities and word or chess puzzles. It's much higher quality than newsprint publications of the same, too. - Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
It's something like XKCD meets Calvin and Hobbes in a mad toboggan race against killer snowmen. I read XKCD, too, because I'm exposed to it everywhere else. - The Old New Thing
Microsoft's own Raymond Chen ranting about Windows. This is always a special treat, because it illustrates why and how Windows is so Byzantinian. It's just plain interesting.
(Notable bits that are missing: Reddit (I use an official client instead), private entries for LiveJournal (ditto), and Dreamwidth reading (I use the web interface occasionally).
It all ends up nicely syndicated into a Kindle newspaper that I can download from my bedside and start reading in the morning. And I enjoy that; it gives me a start to what's going on in the world, without making me feel overwhelmed.
What do you read daily, and how do you make it work for you? I'm curious.
