Staying Informed Without Drowning in Data By JENNA WORTHAM

December 18, 2008
Basics
Staying Informed Without Drowning in Data By JENNA WORTHAM

I'M a reporter and I write about the Internet. I write about its culture, its latest developments and the people and companies involved. You may think this means I spend a lot of time watching videos of advice-dispensing ninjas and funny photographs of cats but that, sadly, is not the case.

What I do spend a lot of time doing is scouring the Internet for information and news. This is great because the Internet makes this easier than ever. This is also a huge pain because the Internet makes this easier than ever. There's a never-ending sea of news sources, and if I just plunge in headfirst, I'll probably get overwhelmed in minutes. And yet to be ahead of the news, I can't just read the big, mainstream publications — I have to dig deeper and find more specialized sites and blogs that are often closer to the action.

The key is to manage the information overflow. This can be done through sites and services that filter and curate the online news-scape into something I can actually digest. With a little time spent exploring and tailoring these sites, you too can get better, deeper information on subjects you care about — and it won't take you days to sort through it all.

With millions of Web sites and blogs, there's no shortage of news, so some filtering is required. Social news sites are one place to begin the culling. They rely on the wisdom of the crowds to determine which headlines are newsworthy by seeing which headlines are being read most. The community of users at sites like Digg, Reddit, Propeller and Delicious rank stories in order of importance, creating a list of stories you can refer to at will.

But why skim through the top articles on just one social news site when you can track what's bubbling up across the majority of those sites? NewzNozzl pulls top news stories from the above-mentioned social bookmarking sites as well as Mixx, Propeller and Newsvine to create a prefiltered flow of hot news items. Like Digg and its social bookmarking brethren, NewzNozzl welcomes interested parties to join the service to vote and share stories within the site.

There are pitfalls to relying on a vast community of users. They may prefer to popularize more sensational news headlines like "Former Miss America Pops Out Her Tooth" and "The 6 Deadliest Creatures (That Can Fit in Your Shoe)." If that isn't quite what you're looking for, try sites like Addictomatic, Yahoo Buzz or BuzzTracker. These sites eschew the system of ranking user-submitted stories by popular votes and instead, rely on stories collected from a preapproved list of publishers.

BuzzTracker, for example, follows more than 100,000 different news sources as diverse as Boing Boing and The Washington Post, and presents its daily list of offerings in an accessible layout. Addictomatic delivers a compact snapshot of the news from a host of sources. For example, a quick search for the comedian Tina Fey returns top Google News searches, YouTube videos and Flickr photos compiled onto a single page.

If you're feeling particularly adventurous, hop over to one of my personal favorites, BuzzFeed, a site that employs both paid staff and volunteers to create a user-generated hot list of newsworthy items. Browsing the site can be a little risky, as submissions run the gamut from breaking political news to stills from celebrity sex tapes, but BuzzFeed has rewarded me with gems like the Lasagna Cat (vintage Garfield comic strips re-enacted as live-action Web shorts) and newly born Internet memes (like Disaster Girl).

For a more tailored approach, RSS subscribers like Google Reader, FeedDemon and Bloglines have long offered ways to collect content from blogs and news sites and put them into a simple combined list of stories that you can check in on periodically. But there's a major pitfall to using RSS feeds: Given the vast smorgasbord of news feeds at your disposal, it's easy to overindulge on news subscriptions. Too many feeds can cause your number of subscriptions to become bloated and unmanageable. (At last glance, my RSS reader has more than 30,000 unread items from 500 different feeds, sorted into a dozen or so different folders.)

Here's where RSS tools can come in handy. RSS filters like ReadBurner and RSSMeme are applications that pick out the most popular links from RSS aggregating sites like Google Reader. They work similarly to Digg, but rather than tally the popularity of an article by votes, they generate lists based on the number of times a particular article has been shared across certain RSS subscribers.

The content streaming down these sites throughout the day tends to be a hodgepodge of random articles and breaking news. Recently, sprinkled in among reports of President Bush's near miss with a pair of size 10 shoes were the equally eye-grabbing headlines "Ms Pacman Tattoo" and "Video Game Design Between 1990-2008." Guaranteed procrastination aids, perhaps, but entertaining nonetheless. And the mixed bag of headlines doubles as a fascinating overview of the news climate — a cross-section of what's capturing the interest of hundreds of Web surfers at any given moment.

LinkRiver is another spin on an RSS filter, but this particular service concentrates your content and bookmarks from a variety of RSS subscriptions — Google Reader, Delicious, Yahoo! Bookmarks — into a single, steady stream of links. More interestingly, LinkRiver lets you read what other people are reading. And not just a faceless community of users, either — LinkRiver lets you browse the pooled content of its members or home in on specific contributors, which include tech bloggers like Robert Scoble; entrepreneurs like Evan Williams, founder of the microblogging platform Twitter; and Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape.

Alternatively, you can isolate a handful of your own RSS feeds and transform that data into a format that resembles a newspaper. Tabbloid, created by Hewlett-Packard, rounds up as few or as many news feeds as you like and cobbles them together into a makeshift newsletter or tabloid format, then delivers it in PDF format via e-mail at the desired frequency, either daily or weekly. Feedbooks, an e-Book platform, also offers a version of a digitized newsstand that can be delivered to a laptop or mobile device not only in PDF but also in formats compatible with a Cybook or a Sony Reader.

Finally, don't fear Twitter. Don't worry about learning how to friend and follow on the service — you can transform Twitter into a useful and relatively unobtrusive news ticker. Start by downloading a desktop application like Twirl and subscribing to various news feeds — The New York Times, CNN, The Huffington Post, National Public Radio, to name a few.

Or seek out companies you could use updates on — a recent update on JetBlue, for example, read "Did you know we can fit 5 surfboards in our E-190 aircraft? Orlando to San Jose, Costa Rica, starts March 26." A recent tweet from Starbucks's headquarters in Seattle offered information on drink ingredients and holiday store hours.

But before you get too Twitter-happy, a word of caution: Anyone can create a Twitter account with no identity verification, so take some accounts — like certain celebrity streams — with a big grain of salt. You can often check the veracity with a blog post on a company Web site confirming its existence. After all, if you're going to limit the information you get online, you're going to want to make sure the information you get is right.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/18/technology/personaltech/18basics.html?sq=Drowning%20in%20Data&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print

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