One of my favorite times of the day is when I open my Google Reader and scan through the hundreds of RSS/Atom blog posts, articles, updates, etc. People who don’t use feed readers think it’s a bit compulsive to actually read hundreds of blogs. What they don’t get is that you really just skim the headlines until you find something of interest. The process is akin to scanning a newspaper. You don’t read every article obviously. It takes about 5 minutes to thoroughly scan 100 headlines. Most days I have 150 to 300 headlines to scan.
My feeds tend to break down into four broad categories: Russian current events, the social media blogosphere, global macroeconomic trends, and web design. My areas of focus may shift slightly over the long-term depending on where I am and what I’m doing. For example, I used to publish a blog called, Flying Seeds, which focused almost exclusively on web widgets (i.e. those embed codes you paste in your blog sidebar). You can still find some blog posts from that period, deep in my archives.
The process of skimming though one’s feed reader is analogous to any triage process (think emergency rooms). Some feeds I read immediately, others are opened and bookmarked into a Read Later folder. Some items I “share” using Google Reader’s share widget. These items show up on my blog in the sidebar in a little box. Some I will occasionally email to someone who may find the item interesting.
It’s a bit ironic that I was never the type of person who would read the whole newspaper each day over coffee. Instead, I used to “consume” a vast quantity of magazines. Literally, dozens each month. Now…. I read maybe one magazine in paper form each month. That magazine, Vanity Fair, remains my all-time favorite. Like my feed reader, Vanity Fair combines seemingly disparate topics within one magazine. I even have it delivered here to Krasnodar by post.
The best part of using a feed reader to follow hundreds of blogs, newspapers, magazines, and websites are the little surprises you receive every once in a while. Just today, I was skimming through my feed reader when I came upon an item by Sebastien Provencher. Sebastien writes a blog called, The Praized Blog, and focuses on “where local meets social” (i.e. ways in which social media tools can be better used to cover/search local towns and cities). The blog post by Sebastien titled, “Why Monocle is probably my favorite magazine now” wasn’t particularly eye-catching or earth shattering but for some reason I paused and started to read it. At the bottom of the post was the following paragraph:
BTW, if anyone needs more convincing arguments (that Monocle is a great magazine), Alain de Botton, currently the best young philosopher in the world, is a regular contributor. If you don’t know de Botton, you need to read “How Proust can change your life“, “The art of travel” and “Status anxiety“.
Now that caught my eye. “…the best young philosopher in the world…”? Quite a claim, no? Let’s check this out further.
So I clicked on the link for Alain de Botton’s name and checked-out his website. Immediately, I was impressed with his website design (see image at beginning of this post). I like websites that have static one page “splash pages” (I’m currently working on adding one to my Wordpress blog by using the home.php page versus the index.php but I still need to grock it further).
The website itself was also organized in an unique manner. There were boxes for various topics of interest: architecture, status, travel, philosophy, literature, love, and work. It turns out that each section is the general theme for each of his books. here’s what de Botton has to say about “travel” in his book The Art of Travel:
Few things are as exciting as the idea of travelling somewhere else. But the reality of travel seldom matches our daydreams. The tragi-comic disappointments are well-known: the disorientation, the mid-afternoon despair, the lethargy before ancient ruins. And yet the reasons behind such disappointments are rarely explored.
We are inundated with advice on where to travel to; we hear little of why we should go and how we could be more fulfilled doing so. The Art of Travel is a philosophical look at the ubiquitous but peculiar activity of travelling ‘for pleasure’, with thoughts on airports landscapes, museums, holiday romances, photographs, exotic carpets and the contents of hotel mini-bars. The book mixes personal thought with insights drawn from some of the great figures of the past. Unlike existing guidebooks on travel, it dares to ask what the point of travel might be - and modestly suggests how we could learn to be less silently and guiltily miserable on our journeys.
My thoughts exactly. I want to learn more. I want to listen to this book on audio (I now consume 90% of my books through digital audio on my iPhone in the car, shopping, on the treadmill, or even travelling).
Let’s try another topic and see what de Botton has to say about “status” in his book Status Anxiety:
This is a book about an almost universal anxiety that rarely gets mentioned directly: an anxiety about what others think of us; about whether we’re judged a success or a failure, a winner or a loser. This is a book about status anxiety.
We care about our status for a simple reason: because most people tend to be nice to us according to the amount of status we have (it is no coincidence that the first question we tend to be asked by new acquaintances is ‘ What do you do?’). With the help of philosophers, artists and writers, the book examines the origins of status anxiety (ranging from the consequences of the French Revolution to our secret dismay at the success of our friends), before revealing ingenious ways in which people have learnt to overcome their worries in their search for happiness. It aims not only to be entertaining, but wise and helpful as well.
….and there’s more. Click image below to see all his books:
How great is it to serendipitously discover an author of this caliber? I had never heard of Alain de Botton before today (Merry Russian Christmas, by the way) and now I’ve got at least two books added to my Audible.com wish list (quick aside. Hey Audible, you really ought to give customers the ability to create a little html or javascript embed code widget so they can display their reading lists or wish lists on their own websites. Get with the program. Everyone else had widgets in 2007).
Think about the authors that get you really juiced-up for the release of their next book. How about Nelson Demille? Are there many better beach books than Charm School or Gold Coast. How about Malcolm Gladwell’s (hence the title : ) Tipping Point and Outliers (Blink was good but not great). Do you know, by the way, that there is a whole collection of priceless articles by Gladwell in the New Yorker magazine archives. Here’s the link. The point I’m making is that there are certain authors who when you read their books you wish they didn’t have to end. They are just that good! Tom Wolfe is on that list too.
What I’m hoping is that de Botton will fall into this elite class of authors whom I love. If so, then 2009 will be a great year because I’ll never have to worry about traffic again (i.e. I listen to audiobooks in the car and if I like the book then I’m just as happy to be in the car as anywhere else).
So thanks to Sebastien over at The Praized Blog (which I want to note is an excellent blog) for taking the time to add that last paragraph to his blog post today.
I encourage those of you who like to consume news and information and are curious to discover new ideas, books, blogs, theories, etc to create a Google account and activate your very own feed reader. Here’s a link to the main Google Reader page. You can use your standard Google (Gmail) username and password to log-in. Here’s a quick tour of Google Reader and, of course, here’s the Wikipedia page for Google Reader.
As you surf the web I am sure you noticed, perhaps without even thinking much about, a little orange icon up in the corner. That icon, see below, is for a website’s RSS/Atom feed. If you click that icon you will be either taken to a page which lets you immediately add the URL to your Google Reader or else to another page where you will need to manually copy/paste the URL up in the address window in the browser and then paste manually into your Google Reader. Click the image below to see my own RSS page.
If you want to jump into the deep end right now, leave me a Comment (below) that you’d like my opml file and I’ll email it to you. An opml file is basically a list of all my actual RSS/Atom feeds which I have in my Google Reader. The file format is called .xml (as opposed to .doc for MS Word or .html for a webpage). You can automatically import ALL my feed subscriptions into your feed reader. Beware, you will experience a bit of information overload if you have never used a feed reader before and import all my feeds.
My opml file has maybe 250 individual feeds which link directly to blogs or websites. I am continually adding and deleting feeds from this file within my Google Reader. I have broken my feeds into folders, which hopefully will come over on an import. Get rid of the ones you don’t want and browse the ones that seem interesting. Remember, I actually only read, in full, about 15% of the articles linked to the individual headlines I skim.
If you do decide to stick with Google Reader you will quickly be thrilled to learn that there are keyboard short-cuts which make skimming through headlines MUCH easier. For example, I will manually click with my cursor the “All Items” folder in the top left-hand side of my Google Reader window. Then I will simply hit the “j” key to jump to the next item (it’s getting faded quickly). The “k” key lets you go backwards. The “v” key will open an item in a new window/tab and take you to the actually webpage where that item “lives” permanently. Lastly, the space bar will auto scroll if there’s text down below you want to read.
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. I’d be glad to help you get started and hopefully, you will stumble across gems like Alain de Botton yourself.
PS: Here’s Malcolm Gladwell’s blog Atom feed address:
http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/atom.xml
