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Google Reader 2: How I browse the web
Editing is the real trick to manage large volumes of information. To avoid bias, use multiple editing strategies with some referral to raw sources.
Sections: Emerging Practice Tools and Analytics
Topics: aggregation google syndication
My little post on the Google reader prompted a couple of responses inspiring me to lay out how I browse the web. The Google reader is one of many offerings that allows you to follow web sites using their syndication feeds. Essentially, the reader gathers the feeds from each site and presents them to you in one single web page, making web surfing much more efficient because you now only have to go to one page.
If you think of feedreaders that way, then it's clear that the issue is how to construct the most efficient display. This screenshot illustrates my most recent strategy:
Basically, I'm getting information from a lot of sources and using various kinds of editing to weed it down to the bare essentials via tools provided me by the Google Portal. Slashdot and the New York Times are examples of human editing. Google News, The Weather, and Movies are algorithmic. The BIT320 remix is a selection of sources that I want to follow for a project.
The sources themselves, representing participants in a class at the Ross School, are important to me. I want to know what they are saying. The editing here is at the source level.
That's it for the quick view.
In comments to the last post, Josh Porter suggested that feedreaders never scaled. Basically, I think I agree in the sense that trying to follow 750 raw sources (per David Newberger's report in a separate comment) is pretty much unmanageable now matter how you lay them out. However, editing biases what you see. If you look at my portal page, you'll see that I'm using several different, somewhat overlapping, editing approaches to counteract that bias.
I am using a feedreader to plunge into raw sources by the way. I'll talk about that in another post.
Bud posted this on October 9, 2005
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