I’ve never until the past couple days read Slate or Salon except for the casual visit. Slate’s articles are mostly free and I’m not prepared to pay for another monthly service for Salon (though I might – the two for one combo of Salon and The Well seems pretty appealing). Plus, Slate publishes a couple sentence description of all their new articles each day in RSS format so I can add them to my aggregator.
I’ve been very impressed with Slate’s stuff so far, and the description in the aggregator is enough to allow me to judge whether to click through or not. My favorite feature of Slate is its daily “Today’s Papers” feature. Here’s today’s. I know this particular feature is blasted out to hundreds of thousands of people each day, so maybe I’m behind the curve. But it is a nice overview of how each major US daily approached the day’s events. This supplements my reading of the NewsDesigner blog which analyzes the graphical, visual choices a paper makes. (There is a weekly feature too which covers all the weeklies.) There have also been some darn good articles that I haven’t seen elsewhere or if I have, not written as well. The best part? They’re all brief and delivered right into your aggregator.
So now I monitor about 50 blog feeds, read three daily papers (Times, Journal, and SF Chronicle though not all sections from all three), two current affairs monthlies (Atlantic and Harpers), three business monthlies (Harvard Biz Review, Fast Company, Inc), two government weeklies (American City and County and Governing), a business weekly (Fortune), a weekly politics/internet email newsletter, a daily Software Information Industry Association briefing, and a few other specialty email lists. Am I suffering from information overload? I hope not. It may be one reason why I have a hard time remembering things that don’t naturally engage me, because I have so much other stuff flying around in my head. Consuming this much information also allows me to easily discern good stuff from BS.
On a related note, does anyone have good articles or resources on digital lifestyle aggregation? I just heard that buzzword, and it sounds intriguing.
Interesting post indeed. As a young person craving such information my habits have been pretty close to yours. I monitor approximately sixty feeds, have in the past continually read Fortune, Fast Company, HBR, etc. I tried to regulate my reading of periodicals against those on my “Books to Read” list. After a while I became so rigid and forced myself to read things I didn’t want to read but committed to (i.e. making sure I read all posts on the feeds, scouring Fortune cover-to-cover, etc). At the end of it all, I shut down and for weeks stopped reading blogs, books, everything because I became so frustrated. The information is certainly valuable, but just remember to be sure you continue sucking up information within your capacity and not beyond it!