Filtering the Web

Jan 14 15:45 UTC 2010

How do you keep up with all the stuff that interests you on the
web?  Out of that vast quantity of material, what techniques do you
use to zero in on items of interest to you?

For years I've used an RSS reader for that purpose.  Most news sites
and blogs supply RSS feeds, to which you can subscribe and be
notified whenever new material is posted.

Specifically, I use NetNewsWire for Mac OS X, but there are lots
of other RSS clients available - for Windows, Linux, OS X, mobile,
web-based.  Google Reader is a popular web-based one.  The major
browsers have built-in RSS capability too (e.g. Firefox's "Live
Bookmarks").

On my Android-based smartphone I use NewsRob, an RSS client that
syncs with Google Reader.

I use RSS to keep up with headline news from the New York Times,
AnnArbor.com, and other sources, specialty web sites that deal with
topics I'm interested in, various blogs, a few Flickr photo streams,
comics like Dilbert, Doonesbury, and XKCD, movie and TV news and
reviews, and Netflix new releases.  RSS is really nice for organizing
and giving you control over your websurfing.

Lately, though, I find myself relying more and more on Twitter,
which seems to have become very big in the past year, to find things
of interest.  In case you're not familiar with it, Twitter allows
you to post short messages (at most 140 characters) and "follow"
other Twitter users' posts.  You get to decide whose posts you want
to see.  Celebrities are using it now - e.g. I currently follow
Jane Fonda, Al Gore, Jennifer Granholm and Sarah Palin.  (A motley
crew, eh?) Currently I'm following 60 people, and 62 people are
following me.  A lot of good it does my followers, though, as I
don't post much.

The way it works is, I run a Twitter client on my laptop (specifically,
an application called Tweetie for Mac OS X, but there are many other
clients for all platforms, or you can just go to the Twitter website,
http://twitter.com.)  Whenever anybody that I follow posts something,
it shows up in my Twitter client a few minutes later.  I check on
what's new a few times a day.

I find that I use Twitter mostly as a recommendation system - I
follow folks who tend to post links that I find interesting.  This
includes Roger Ebert (who twitters a lot, and also has a *great*
blog), Cory Doctorow, Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide
Web), David Pogue (NY Times technology columnist), Dave Winer (RSS
guru), Charles Blow (NY Times op-ed columnist), danah boyd (social
networking researcher), Ed Vielmetti (Ann Arbor guru about all
things online), Jeff Jarvis ("new journalism" pundit), and Shelley
Powers (web technologist), among others.

The advantage of Twitter over RSS is the human filtering element -
I get a degree of quality control by following people who tend to
post good (from my perspective) links.

So how do you keep track of content on the web?  How do you filter
it?

response 2 of 8:

Jan 14 15:57 UTC 2010

I use Bloglines for my RSS feeds which is nice because I dont always use
the same computer and it is web based.  I havent been much into twitter
lately. I used to have a plug in with Firefox which would give me real
time updates from twitter right in the browser but it broke when I
upgraded Firefox and I havent bothered to fix it. 

Mostly I dont worry too much about finding content on the web. Either
someone will tell me about a site or post a link here or on Facebook or
whatever and then I'll find it or I can search for things. There are
sites I have bookmarked which I go to when I am bored but I dont follow
the sites. I mean, I have a guilty pleasure of LOLcats but I dont have
icanhascheezburger.com in my RSS feed because I dont care if I miss
some. I just look at those when I am in the mood. 

response 4 of 8:

Jan 14 17:43 UTC 2010

I use Google Reader extensively, since it puts the necessary information
out in the cloud. I use so many different computers that I try not to
keep any information local unless it can be synchronized by Xmarks.

I haven't yet chosen an RSS reader for my Android phone (just got it a
couple days ago.) I guess I'll check NewsRob out, although so far I find
that when I read stuff on my phone I'm looking for specific information
to solve a specific problem, not just catching up.

response 6 of 8:

Jan 14 18:49 UTC 2010

IR DCI "filters the web" for me. Oil money and (income, property, services,
consumption, value-added) tax well spent. I needn't worry about any "extra"
information. Oh wait, why is that goat porn site still accessible?!

response 8 of 8:

Jan 14 19:13 UTC 2010

Seriously though, I keep a local portable bookmark cloud. WikidPad is a
wonderful piece of (free, open-source) software. Among its uses: I keep one
wiki page per bookmark with a few sentences about the bookmark, order
bookmarks by automatic time tags, add descriptive attributes to each bookmark
page at the time of creation ('linguistics,' 'interesting,' 'readable,'
'software,' a.s.o.), then search for the right bookmark through WikidPad's
"Views" mechanism which filters pages based on attributes. The space of
attributes in WikiPad (and many other wiki systems) works like the tag cloud
in some (or all?) blogging software. I can also export all or part of the
bookmark cloud to any one of a number of formats, most notably plain text
(duh!), and use text tools (grep, sed, my own Perl scripts) to extract bits
not immediately accessible through WikidPad (given I don't know Python--if
you do you'll be golden with WikidPad since it provides a versatile Python
API and executes Python code in place).

The strength of an attribute space or a tag cloud is of course emergent order.
For example, I add the attribute 'industrial' to each industry-related
bookmark wiki page. If I ever "view" my bookmark subwiki through the
'industry' attribute I will get pointers to the bulk of industry-related
matter I have ever encountered including those I may have long forgotten
about. While looking for the link to, say, vendor X's brochures I realize I
had once paid vendor Y's brochures a visit months ago; on occasion this may
be precisely what I need.