This isn’t a rhetorical question. I’m serious. How do you?
I’m lazy and don’t have much time in front of the computer. That will change some day, but not in the next year or two. I was using delicious.com for my bookmark management across sites but it doesn’t work that well on my phone so I started stuffing everything into Google reader. Once I find a site I want to keep up with so I add it to Google Reader. I have Google Reader on my phone so most of my reading is via RSS feeds on my phone.
If a site doesn’t have an RSS feed and it’s not a big name site (like cnn.com), there is very little chance I will ever return. I troll the big sites occasionally but not often.
So pretty much it’s Google Reader or a search. My husband swears I’m very odd by only reading from RSS and that the rest of the world doesn’t read like this. So how do they read? I’m not talking about finding a new site to read. I’m talking about once you find a site, how do you keep it on your regular radar.
So, how do you?
I’m with you, all my Web reading is via bloglines.com, which handles anything with an RSS, or I collect things that I see on Twitter via the “favorites” function for later read and possible retweet. I very seldom go to the actual blog unless I want to respond (like this time).
As for keeping up, though, that’s laughable!
I don’t think that’s weird at all; I read from Google Reader & Twitter the vast majority of the time.
I do use Instapaper as a short-term cache for articles I want to read in “attention” mode instead of “skimming” mode; it helps that Tweetie (my iPhone Twitter client) and Reeder (my iPhone Google Reader client) both have built-in support for sending URLs to Instapaper.
Yep, I’m a google reader girl, too – and that’s about it! I use delicious, but I have probably referenced it 4 times in 3 years – it just makes me feel better that I’m somehow noting the site.
Hi Laura, Dan, & Syd,
Thanks for chiming in. I’m wondering what the other ways of repetitive information consumption are: major portal like MSN or NYTimes, subject-based portals. All the people I know either are avid Internet readers or think the computer is for email only if they have one at all. All or nothing kind of usage. I need to find those middle ground users and figure out what they are doing so I can get some new ideas. But where to find them — thoughts?
Thx,
Dina