I have shifted the vast majority of my news reading onto the web. I have not purchased a newspaper in months and I rarely, if ever, read the local online newspapers (after all, Miranda Devine is the reason I unsubscribed from the Sydney Morning Herald).
Newspapers and magazines, however, do serve a function that I miss – that I am poorer for by not having them in my life. Through the juxtaposition of stories, newspapers help to create a context, a lens, for the happenings of the world at a certain point in time. But now, it looks like there may be a neat, new Firefox plug-in that turns your favourite feeds into something a little more visual, more integrated and a whole lot more compelling than a never ending stream of unread feeds.
I spent an hour or so bringing my favourite feeds into Bloglines and then sucked them into the Feedly application. Now I not only can get a visual snapshot of my favourite blogs, I get to see a bit of the Twitter conversation as it flashes by, or I can get a digest or the latest posts. And if I want to dig, I can do so by category. I can also easily search the blogs that I subscribe to.
And while all these are great features, more importantly, Feedly lets me see the CONTEXT in which I am consuming all this content. It lets me see what smart people are saying IN RELATION TO each other. And that makes me a whole lot happier – and a whole lot smarter.
I have a feeling that this may well change the way I think of my Monday morning feed reading.
Gavin,
Yikes! I think you’ve just given me homework to do with Bloglines and Feedly.
Here’s what I think we also miss by not reading newspapers or magazines(online or print): serendipity. When looking the NYT or the WSJ, I will often stumble upon something I never would have looked for, but love finding nonetheless.
Sad to say, I don’t seem to have much time left for serendipity anymore.