B left some comments on the “Links” post I put up the other day, and I thought I’d take the chance to show you folks what my RSS reader looks like and what my workflow is for all the things I read on the internet. Typically, this is not something that is interesting for people that don’t sit around in front of a computer all day, but it is certainly fascinating to me.
I love to read about people’s consumption workflows. I don’t think that I am that much out of the norm from most people, but perhaps this post will completely prove me wrong. I know I have an inability to keep my information consumption in check and I know that I am not the only one. Nor do I believe that I have an unlimited capacity of attention, and every time I check my email, twitter, tumblr, voicemail, blog comments, etc., I’m making a little withdrawal from my attention bank. I have an idea of how much information I consume on a daily basis, and I realize that the only way I can keep up or keep it at bay is by organizing myself, because I certainly can’t give in to that temptation of not looking at my Inbox or Twitter 57 times a day. If I sat down to check every single one of the website I look at everyday, I would never get anything done. I’m amazed that I get as much done as I currently do.
Input
So here it is:
I’m currently subscribed to 249 feeds. Here are subscription trends:
As you can see, I don’t read them all, and my Greader Inbox never gets below 1000+. I’ve tried once or twice to get this count well below that, but it seemed pointless when I was doing it as well as afterwards, when after a few hours, I would still not have a dent in it. This used to drive me crazy, and if you’ve ever seen my Gmail Inbox, you’d know why (I only keep emails that require a response in my Inbox, everything else gets archived). That’s why I created a “favs” folder that I’d funnel all the websites that I would typically view on a daily basis and I could keep up with fairly consistently (although sometimes, Bruce Sterling makes it difficult).
Now this stuff is pretty self-explanatory and representative of several of my interests: Interaction Design, burgers, Mariners baseball. Lately, I’ve been obsessed with BERG and the ever growing futurism think-tank hailing from the UK and beyond (this includes Ellis and the aforementioned Sterling). There are a few things there that require cleaning because they just haven’t posted in a really long time. The beauty of this is, since I only typically see if something’s been updated, I don’t really need to subscribe, and it’s not taking away any of my attention. That, my friends, is the beauty of push.
Now, I do have another folder of sites that I will empty daily, but that one is less taxing, and reminds me that 95% of all blogs started in 2008 were abandoned. That’s my list of friends with blogs. That’s here:
Some of these have been done with for a long time, and some aren’t even blogs, some are just RSS feeds of other people’s output (like the delicious feeds). I still like to keep them around though, because it’s fun to have friends on the internet.
Right now, I actually just use Google Reader as an aggregator first, and a reader second. I still look at stuff pretty often in it, but most of the heavy-lifting and longer articles all get read in Instapaper mostly on my iPhone, while waiting for or on the ferry (formerly the subway, and in the near-future, the bus). I use that to create a backlog of items that I wanted to read but don’t have time to. This is mostly stuff that doesn’t expire in a day or two, like longer magazine pieces or (very mildly) work-related long blog posts. This is a long blog post. If I read me, I’d read this in Instapaper. I run through my queue at Instapaper and tend to use that as my resource for things I send over to Tumblr, and most of the links from Twitter usually come from other’s tweets or from Google Reader.
Here’s part of my current queue.
I rarely actually read any books anymore, which is a damn shame. I’m in the middle of (okay, actually very close to the beginning of) Shop Class as Soulcraft. I will finish it this year. I’d like a Kindle though, because while reading on my phone is not something I’m adverse to doing, I like the idea of reading something a little closer to ink on paper. That would also enable me to read “books” when everything in my queue looks boring.
Output
I admit my output channels are fairly inconsistent. Google Reader is one of the places I’ve been visiting and sharing stuff at for about 2 years now though. It’s super-easy, but you need to have an account to read that stuff, unless, of course, you’re visiting the public shared page which isn’t easy to find.
I recently started posting other stuff that is all interaction design related over at the blog on my other site, blog.ntimsalazar.com, which is powered by Tumblr, which is another great tool that’s fun to use and easy to follow people with. It’s like Twitter on steroids. It’s definitely better designed than Google Reader, and a lot easier to use and share with, but again, you have to have a Tumblr account to participate.
And then, of course, there’s Twitter. Most of my inane stuff goes there, but it’s also linked to my Tumblr. I’m not totally happy with the fact that most of my Tumbls end up there when I post to Tumblr, mostly because I know most of my audience on Twitter could give two shits about the stuff I post to Tumblr. So I try to keep it light when I know I’m throwing a bunch of stuff through that blog.
I still have a Del.icio.us feed, too, which has been a little more active since I’ve been trying to collect links/images/quotes for a guest lecture that I’m hopefully doing in NYC next month. Possibly, Baltimore, too, thanks to J-Fry!
My last spot for output is, of course, here, and you all know how frequent that is. I thought about trying to do Nablopomo over whatever it is, but then thought that there was no way in hell I was going to be able to do that. I did do Nanowrimo about 6-8 years back, which was a long time ago.
I created a pipe for all this stuff, which basically just funnels pretty much everything I do on the web as far as public output.
So, now that you’re thoroughly bored: What are your favorite feeds? Mine are all pretty much listed above, so there you go. Anything I should be reading?
