Friday 19 January 2007

Faster, better news

I've only recently discovered the Google Reader "List" view, as distinct from the "Expanded" view. Now, it sounds like a really tiny thing - to see only headlines instead of the whole story - but it's saving me time. I'm subscribed to about 40 news feeds, some of them very active, and so I usually have a pretty decent backlog of news to sift through. The list view helps me do that just a bit faster by minimising the scrolling I do. It really is a little thing, but it's one of those little changes that brings big rewards. It's hard to convey in words, and I don't have any real statistics to back it up. I'm estimating that my news reading is taking only about a third of the time it used to.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Very nerdy, I know.
PPS - But when I felt like I was drowning in news, it's fantastic.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Small change... Yes
Seemingly insignificant... Yes
Ability to save hours by not reading things you really aren't that interested in... FANTASTIC!

No nerds about it... I wish I had something that summarized all the crap I have to read!

John said...

Those are called "secretaries" aren't they? ;)

Maybe several years from now, when language processing is up to the task, we'll have software to read and summarise articles for us. I expect the market then to become suddenly flooded by "ten-minute books": auto-summarised versions of novels for tomorrow's busy reader.

Of course then you'll have more work to do, because the reading takes less time and you can fit more in.