Google Reader

Google Reader

If you spend a lot of time reading on the internet, (by that, I don’t necessarily mean spending the time browsing people’s Facebook oneliners and paying your bills, but actually using it as the information source it is) then you are probably very busy right now, and I’ll get right to the point.

Use an aggregator for RSS feeds. It provides you with a clean view of a great deal of sources, from your favourite 100% online newspapers (and their brilliant political comics, like Doonesbury), to these pseudo-attempts of “established” media desperately trying to justify their dual physical/online existance. (Some do this better than others, but I’ll save that for a later rant.)

The point is that most of these are providing feeds of their news. Look for this symbol in your browser and click it to understand more. It’s worth it.

When you are on a site providing such feeds, then you can click on this icon in your browser in order to get the feed address which is usable in RSS/Atom feed aggregators. Such aggregators are probably integrated to your browser, like the well known Firefox (look at “get plugins/addons”) and even in Internet Explorer.

If you prefer to use a seperate application for this, then you can google¹ for them, or you can do what I do, use the excellent Google Reader which in my opinion just makes the internet a less noisy world to be in. It makes your up-to-date feeds available wherever you are.

For the time being, I don’t know of any better alternatives for me. If you read a lot of stuff happening on the internet (news, comics, torrents, blogs, podcasts), then perhaps you should check it out as well.

___
¹) I almost can’t believe that Google seemingly have their own verb in almost all world languages now.