How to Read 1000 Different Web Sites a Day Without Breaking a Sweat (and while still having a life)
March 25th, 2008 Oliver StarrCategories | Best Practices | Downloads | Features | Software | Tips - How To's
It’s No Joke…
No, the headline is not a typo. It is possible to read a thousand or more different web sites each day. If you know the secret,you know I’m telling the truth; if you don’t I’m sure you find this hard to believe or even impossible to imagine. Well, for those of you that know what I’m about to divulge, move along, nothing to see here - for everyone else, please suspend your disbelief for the next five minutes and you will be generously rewarded for your mental flexibility.
The Secret to Reading 10,000 Blogs
What I’m about to share with you is a technology so incredible that once you take advantage of it, your entire online experience will be transformed and made more powerful, more productive and more efficient by an order of magnitude or more. In fact, it is possible to become so efficient at scanning the web for the information you crave that you could become as efficient as one individual I know who routinely scans more than 10,000 different sites a couple of times a week. I swear I am not making this up.
Three Little Letters: R-S-S
The technology that makes this feat possible and which will turn you into the speed browser you never dreamed you could be is known as RSS. This is an acronym for “Really Simple Syndication” and it is a protocol that enables publishers to quickly and efficiently post content in chronological order and to notify something called a pingserver every time they’ve updated their sites.
For the other side of the equation, the reader (that would be you) accesses this content using something called a “feed reader”. There are dozens of different feed readers available - the differences between them are subtle and personal preference more than functional attributes will ultimately determine which one you use - incidentally, nearly all of them are free so you can try a bunch until you find one you like.
The most popular readers include “Google Reader“, “Bloglines“, “MyYahoo” and “NetNewsWire” which is a down-loadable, Mac-specific product from a company called “Newsgator ” that itself also offers an online reader. As you might have surmised, there are web-based and installable readers and there are even add-ins for other software making it possible to add feed-reading capability to familair software like Outlook.
Everybody, Syndicates!
In each case, what these readers do is allow you to “subscribe” to the content that is being published or syndicated by the content producers. These producers may be bloggers, photojournalists, podcasters, vloggers, or even news sites like the BBC or Reuters - all of them - I should really say all of “Us” since the GTD Times is also a feed use the same basic set up tools to publish our material and to keep it organized and accessible after publication.
Okay, so now I’m sure you are scratching your head and wondering what the big deal is and you’re maybe even thinking that I suffered too much oxygen deprivation during my cycling career and all the neurons aren’t firing at full potential. Bear with me, you’re about to get the payoff…
When you’re browsing the web there are two things that take up an incredible amount of time - even if you have a super fast connection; going from one site to the next waiting for each to load, and visiting a site only to see that the information hasn’t been updated making the visit and the time it took to make it a waste. The problem of course is that you have to “go” to each site - at least metaphorically within your browser. You also have to do this in real time. The site loads after you click a link to go there and it isn’t until you’ve taken these steps that you learn that the second installment to that juicy gossip still hasn’t been posted. Grrr….
And Now, the Web Comes to You!
Here’s why feed readers will rock your world. Instead of you having to go “visit” the sites you find interesting, by using a feed reader those sites actually come to you. What’s more, once you’ve “subscribed” to a site you can tell at a glance if there’s new content up there or not and - get this - that information will have populated your reader before you even seek the information and in fact, within mere moments of the time when the publisher put it up live on his site.
Your reader can aggregate the RSS feed from as many sites as you want to keep track of; you’ll be able to see in an instant which sites have something new to check out, what the headlines of that new material is, a couple of sentences of each post can be displayed either at the same time or by clicking a link that will expand the text or open up the full post - again, all within your feed reader meaning it will open instantly, and backtracking is just as quick.
(clicking the image brings will bring up a full sized version so you can see the elements clearly.)
As you can see, there is a ton of information contained in a fairly condensed space. This is the Google reader. Note that the sites that have new content are bold so they stand out clearly. In many ways, this is organized like email with the message in one area and a preview pane in another, however, unlike email, you aren’t risking getting a virus using a feed reader to view these sites. That isn’t to say that all sites you could come across using a reader are benign, but compared to reading your mail using the preview pane in Outlook, for instance you are far, far safer.
Subscribe to the Whole Internet if you Want to
Adding feeds to your reader is a simple affair. I’m, sure you’ve seen the little badges like the MyYahoo or Google Reader or any one of the several dozen you can see displayed at the top of this post. All you have to do is click the badge that corresponds to the reader that you’re subscribed to and the software will do the rest. Then, all you have to do is navigate to your reader if it’s web based, or instantiate the program if its installed on your computer.
I’m sure you’ll see by the end of your first session that a whole new world awaits you now that the web is coming to you - having been largely tamed, courtesy of RSS feeds and your trust reader. All that’s left for you to do now is grab another cup of coffee, turn off the phone and get cozy with the several thousand sites you’ve always wanted to check out but never had the time. Now you do - all the time in the world.
That is, until you decide this feed stuff seems pretty simple and maybe instead of reading them all the time you’ll start writing one too…
For those of you that are visually inclined, this delightful YouTube Video by Commoncraft gives you the lowdown on RSS too:
This is great to get the word out about RSS. However, I think it’s hugely misleading to say that one will gain lots of time by using RSS. In fact, for many people it has become just another internet timesink. As usual, once we think we have more time, we immediately rush to fill it up with yet another activity — more websites to read! I’d love to see a post on efficient scanning of RSS feeds, and/or a sort of Inbox Zero methodology for dealing with hundreds (maybe even thousands!) of new posts each day.
Is it me or does the link of the image not work. I mean: once you click it, it brings you to the top of the current page not to another place, let alone to a magnified version of the image…
Are you sure this is the most appropriate site for an article as introductory as this?
Perhaps if it were 2004…
Erasure,
Hi. Thanks for your comment. I’m glad you like the information. Your point is a good one. It is true that given new tools we tend to take the efficiency gained and destroy it through uncontrolled use.
Even the PC has the dinstinction - how many hours are lost each business day to the time people spend customizing their themes, changing wallpaper, looking for new cute avatars or pointers? Or the Internet? How much of the gains in research efficiency - remember the library? When’s the last time you went to “the stacks” to do some research? What we gained in time formerly spent driving and searching the card catalog and/or struggling with the microfiche reader we give up in YouTube browsing, StumbingUpon (since when is “stumbling” a good thing? Or shopping on eBay.
I think that people are aware of this and can make their choices accordingly. So while I agree that it certainly bears mention that the time savings is predicated upon gained efficiency for a task that you already would have had to complete (maybe you’re a blogger, or a journalist or a researcher so scanning lots of websites is a prerequisite of your work?). I don’t think that it is truly misleading as people are smart enough to know that doing anything has a resultant time cost associated with it and a commensurate reduction in time available for other things.
Of course it is true that if you weren’t going to browse sites at all, then you’ve now added something new that has to replace some other activity since by definition your day is already completely filled in one way or another and reading web sites will take some of that time.
John, sorry but it’s you…sort of…if you look again at the text under the image you’ll see that it says that a single click will bring up the page with the full post and from that page clicking the image will give you the larger version that you are looking for.
It should give you the larger image on a single click, I agree, but we’re sorting through a minor database issue at the moment and it is for this reason that those gymnastics are necessary. Sorry for the inconvenience and/or confusion.
Editor.
Paul, today was a rather unique day due to a very large mailing of one of David Allen’s newsletters, and thus, it was determined by the editorial team that an article going over RSS and calling it by name and using the correct nomenclature would be of value to people who were being exposed to GTD Times for the first time.
You may know everything about RSS (and the article states as much right up front and even suggests that “there’s nothing to see here if you do”) as I’m sure a lot of GTD Times readers have been using feeds since as far back as 2004, but for a lot of people who are interested in becoming more efficient and productive, the computer is not the focal point of their working environment and the arcane terminology isn’t something that they’ve heard, seen or grown comfortable using.
You would be surprised at the number of people that use iGoogle or MyYahoo who have no idea that they are subscribing to feeds when they add content to those pages or that the standard orange RSS chicklet is the universal symbol indicating that there is a regularly syndicated source of information that can be grabbed and added to your feed aggregation software.
Part of the mission of the GTD Times is to make the information created by David and the other practitioners of this method of personal productivity as broadly accessible and easily understood as possible. This includes making tools such as RSS feeds simple and familiar to everyone - and that includes the executive who until two years ago had his admin print out and deliver all his email and dictate his responses and it also includes people like my Mom - who has two degrees including a Master’s in Urban Economics and who wouldn’t know a feed from an MMS but who can certainly learn about them and subsequently make very effective use of the technology.
Sometimes it is easy to become arrogant in our familiarity with technology. This is especially true if we live and work in a high tech community where everyone is up to speed and where an article on RSS seems remedial.
The truth is we’re still very early on the continuum of the PC revolution and you should understand that we are still far closer to the left side of that time-line that began with “using a computer is only for the super-braniac and about as much fun as dental work” then we are to the ubiquitous embedded computational environment of Minority Report.
Hopefully other articles in the GTD Times will be more up to your level of knowledge and will offer you something that is more useful to your life and work.
Incidentally, and this is by no means sarcastic, we are always happy to receive submissions and in fact sincerely hope the community will contribute actively to the content on this site. With that in mind, if you have material that you think would interest the GTD Times audience, I would love to see it and will gladly publish items that fit within our editorial boundaries.
Sincerely,
Oliver Starr, Editor
Oliver,
Thank you for what is probably a really rudimentary post for many readers but what, to me, is an incredibly clear and concise overview of RSS that I can share with the many, many people I know who are still confused about what it is and how to use it. A colleague and I are working on a web site whose aim it is to encourage more women to become involved with (and work in) the technology realm and a post like yours is exactly the kind of non-condescending tech overview that we’ll be directing people to.
Love the egalitarian approach. Keep up the good work.
Oh — and I sat next to you at dinner the first night of this year’s Web 2.0 conference, then stumbled across this site today via the David Allen newsletter. Small world.
Meghan,
Thanks for the comment! I’m glad that the information will prove useful. Our goal is to make GTD and the tools that we find help us to be more efficient accessible to as many people as possible with all levels of technology experience.
It sounds to me like what you are working on with your colleague will be a great resource to lots of women who shouldn’t be afraid to enter the exciting and influential technology world.
If you have articles that you think have a broad appeal and relate to work/life, productivity, inspiration, how-to or tips and tricks, or anything GTD related, I hope you’ll submit it to us for publication here as well. We’re really serious when we say that we want this site to be a community resource for the open exchange of ideas and information. Women in technology is an under-served segment of the market in my opinion so I am sure that your content would be appreciated by GTD Times readers in addition to the folks that visit your own website.
Oliver Starr, Editor
it’s a great first article !!! RSS does exactly for me the past months as you described above.
I get updated when site I like get more info… of course that’s a HUGE timesaver for me and anyone else who uses it.
Keep up the good work !!
I clicked on the image, it took me to a new page. I clicked on the image again (on the new page) and it takes me back to the same article. It does not give me a larger image. Please advise. Thank You.
This is a great article, and a good way to highlight RSS, as other comments have suggested.
I know that you have listed a few specific RSS readers in your article, but I would like to add one that I feel is particularly useful for Firefox users. It is called Brief (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4578) and it is an add-on for Firefox.
I have used some other readers (Google reader and NewsGator) but I find that Brief is much more convenient to use. It adds a small section in the status bar of your browser which displays (unobtrusively) how many articles are available to read. Clicking on the icon brings up Brief with a very easy navigation window for your RSS feeds. It’s faster to load then navigating to a website.
Thanks
Paul
I completely agree. Using RSS is extremely efficient. No more having to visit one site at a time going through your favorites. I use Google Reader, as do many people these days, and I love it. The web content comes to me. It takes only minutes to read content from tons of sites. I use RSS soo much that it has been ages since I have even visited the source sites. Don’t even remember what most look like. The only reason I have to visit a site these days is to comment, or if I am doing research.