How I Find Things To Read
Following my post on reading, I got a bunch of questions asking how I found what to read on a daily basis. Naturally, I have a routine for this.
One of the first things I check in the morning is Techmeme. Not only is it by far the best technology news aggregator, it’s particularly useful if and when you’ve been away from the internet for a bit (as I am when I’m asleep, 8 hours ahead of the west coast of the United States) and want to catch up. This usually fills my quota of important tech stories I need to follow on any given day. I save most major headlines from here to my Pocket to read later.
From there, I usually turn to Flipboard. While it provides a beautiful reading experience, I also tend to use it as a way to find things to save to read later. Because it’s so much more visual than Twitter itself, I find the browsing experience in Flipboard more pleasurable — especially on an iPad. And it makes saving to services like Pocket simple.
By this point in a day, I’ve been on Twitter at least a few times. And that’s usually where I find any breaking news. And, you guessed it, I save articles from my Twitter stream to Pocket to read later.
I also use Twitter as my feed for getting articles from MediaREDEF. While I really enjoy the daily newsletter, I find it overwhelming. I prefer to get the articles pushed to me on Twitter (I have push notifications turned on for this feed) as they’re added. I certainly don’t save all of these, but I’d guess I save a good ten to twenty percent of the MediaREDEF articles to read later.
There are a handful of sites I visit directly from time-to-time — sites like Daring Fireball. But I mainly use Twitter for this purpose as well — to push new content from these sites to me.
By the end of the day, I’ve already read a lot. And if I’m still looking for more, I’ll scan Nuzzel to see if there was anything I missed that was shared by those I follow on Twitter. Since I’m on Twitter so much as it is, I don’t often find new content this way, but it’s another source that’s great if you’re away from the internet for a bit of time. Nuzzel feels almost exactly like what Twitter’s Discover tab should be (more on that another time).
By now you’ll notice the one thing I haven’t mentioned: RSS. I can’t recall the last time I used an RSS reader on a regular basis, but I know it was the excellent Reeder for iPad. I still check out new RSS readers from time to time, but they mainly just remind me how amazing it was that RSS was a way many of us used to consume content. Talk about information overload.
One element of RSS I do miss is the stripped-down presentation of content. This is especially true as sites like Forbes try to squeeze the last drops of monetization from the stone by harassing us with what I can only describe as the most anti-reader website I’ve ever seen. Luckily, Pocket fills that need for simple, stripped-down reading now.
Something else I don’t use to find content to read: Facebook. I realize I’m in the minority here, but I think Facebook is actually quite awful at surfacing interesting content. I’m shocked anyone uses it this way. But, well, there’s a lot of things you can do when you have a billion people using your service regularly.
Increasingly, I find myself on Medium’s Top Stories page, finding interesting content. And I do like how the Medium app sends a push notification to me when people I follow here publish something.
From time to time, new services pop up that I try out to see how it will fit into my routine. A current one is This, a new link-sharing service that was created under the wing of Atlantic Media.
I should note that each day, I end up saving far more articles than I can possibly read. So most of the above will likely be overkill for many of you — because, again, I read a lot. But, I like my routine and find that it uncovers a lot of the information I want and need.
Of course, I also have a secret weapon: Megan, who does most of the above and shares what she finds most interesting with me on Pocket. The internet is a big place, it’s good to work in pairs.
Disclosure Time: Google Ventures, where I’m a general partner, is an investor in Pocket and Medium. We’re not an investor in any of the other services listed, though I personally own shares of both Twitter and Facebook stock. I sadly own no stake in Forbes or else I’d probably fire everyone who creates their website.
