Since RSS was introduced, the number of sites people are able to read increased substantially. Try these six methods to find more sites to subscribe to and fill in the reading gap.
1. Stick to good things
Let’s say someone you followed on twitter, or a coworker from work sent a link to a useful article in PDF format. PDF documents on the web are disconnected from the site they are published on. That is, there is no navigation menu to put you in context. When you get this kind of document, remove the end of that document’s URL and visit the site that published it. Usually, you will find more interesting things in there.
For example – I got to a document called “Best Practices for Political Advertising Online” while I was reading a post through my RSS reader. That was its original URL:
in this post you will learn how to save time and get the most out of your RSS subscription list in Google reader. the method presented here include 4 steps and is easy to implement right away. it is based on finding the sources that fit you best and unsubscribing to those that do not. just to get some perspective, take a look at my Google Reader stats. I stay on top of 1,043 subscriptions using that method.
My google reader stats
1. Star worth-reading items
the first thing you should do is to star items you like.
Do it whenever you find something that you would define as worth reading; thing you would like to see more of (Star an item by clicking the star next to it in the reading list or by pressing ‘S’ in the keyboard).
Gmail lab feature “Multiple Inboxes” allows you to have more than one ‘inbox’ in your default Gmail view. You can have up to 5 additional panels and set them to display labels, your starred messages, drafts or any search you want next to your inbox. Here is how to start using Multiple Inboxes and 7 great things you can do with it.
Enabling Multiple Inboxes and setting panels
First, to enable Multiple Inboxes go to settings > labs > enable multiple inboxes
Iain Barker explains why you should consider more alternatives when solving a problem (in his case, user interface design) rather than trying to optimize the first reasonable solution found. As illustrated in the image below, jumping too quickly into the iterative phase (the phase where you refine a given solution) might prevent you from seeing a better solution.
As to answering the question “how many alternatives are enough?” The somewhat obvious answer given is that it depends on the specific constrains that are imposed upon you, such as time and budget.
I found the following video, which presents some incredible figures about our world today and in the future, to be very inspiring.
It raises the question – what are the skills that are relevant today and in the near future?
I do not think that the traditional way of education could last much longer. Nowadays, ideas can be spread world-wide at the same day that they were thought of using blogs and other internet technologies (compared to textbooks, which take years to be written and published). I also think that two of these skills are information seeking and self-learning. This is since, while the internet does offer tremendous amount of usable information, one has to find and learn it by oneself.