Reader Stream

How does one use the internet?

The average person will probably check his/ her email (obsessively), use social networks like LinkedIn/ Facebook/ Orkut, perhaps Twitter or blog a bit, and when that's done go to a combination of websites that keep them up to date on matters of interest. For me that would be a smattering of blogs, news, movie reviews, and op-eds.

Now of course, I was spending ridiculous amounts of time going to multiple websites, poring over hundreds of articles and posts, trying to (and failing at) separating the good stuff from the chaff, and often ended up missing stuff I would've liked if I'd only noticed it.

My problem was partially solved a while ago, when K got me hooked on to Google Reader - a fantastic feed reader and aggregator. In a nutshell, it takes the RSS feeds for all your favorite websites and displays them to you in a single stream. You can save yourself multiple bookmarks/ trips to multiple sites however many times you do in a day. I heavily recommend checking it out if you haven't already.

That said though, now I have a new problem. I am over-informed. My 'trends' page on Reader tells me I sort through an average of ~100 posts in a single day. It doesn't (thankfully) tell me how many minutes/ hours a day I spend doing that. It is quite an addiction.

I also have this weird compulsive thing going on - much as with my email inbox I cannot bear to see unread items in the Reader queue. Each item must be read. Good items must be starred or shared... and finally I am over-informed and don't have a peer group of people who are reading what I'm reading (although poor wifey does get subjected to a continuous stream of updates). 

Anyway I figured since Reader lets me share items I think are interesting, I'd put the shared items feed on my blog (in the right hand column). Just another stream of information for those not yet overloaded :D Just so more people know what's on my mind...