Every day, I do my bit to help keep the Internet read. And in my feed aggregator (Google Reader), I’ve got “Starred” items and “Shared” items. The “Shared” list looks kind of lean, perhaps because I felt a subtle pressure to tag only carefully read and reviewed, “curated” links there. The “Starred” stuff, though, is a steadily growing collection of things that “look interesting but that I don’t have the time, or the speakers, or the privacy to get to right now”. Presumably one day I’ll go through them, or not.
I should just call those “Electric Monk” items – bookmarked so that I can avoid actually reading/viewing them.
Speaking of reading feeds, a technique that’s working quite well for me and which I haven’t seen described elsewhere is to split feeds between Firefox’s Live Bookmarks and a proper feed aggregator.
I use the aggregator for feeds where I want to read (or at least skim) each entry – blogs and the like. I use Live bookmarks (which just gives you a regularly-updating menu of about 20 titles with links for each feed) for feeds belonging to one of two categories:
- “Headline-centeric” sites, like Slashdot, Reddit, Digg, New Scientist, BoingBoing, שמה and other proper news sites, where reading all the items is like “sipping from a firehose”, and letting them accumulate unread in the aggregator is depressing. This way, can dip into the links for some casual reading, without the onerous “duty” of tracking each one.
- Updates, feeds that I use to track something, like torrent site searches, comment threads, forum discussions, wiki modifications – these feeds are an easy way to track when I should go to the site and do something – download a torrent, delete spam, respond to a comment.
Hummph. I didn’t plan to get all technical, starting this post.
Anyway, going over the stuff stashed in my “to look at later” items, I found a link to a Hebrew MP3 blog, which I think I bookmarked because it had a picture of a naked chick. And then I looked at the photos and realised I know that person (well, vaguely). Oddly, this isn’t the most dramatic example I’ve seen tonight of someone I know exposing themselves online: Here’s an amazing look at the inside of Folger’s brain.