One of the topics that came up while I was having lunch last week w/ Swissmiss was our systems for checking stuff out on the web. For me one of the ways of getting around using an rss feed reader which I deplore is to use tabs. For me I bookmark blogs and place them in folders in Firefox that then become tabs that I can open. What that means is that within a couple minutes I can open between 35 – 60 blogs and sites. In the past on DesignNotes I’ve gone over why I don’t like rss feed readers so I won’t bore you with the explanation aside from the fact that rss feed readers make reading blogs seem like a never ending chore. My tab method is as follows. I’ve named them M1, M1B, M2 etc… the M1 is a bunch of blogs that I check out quite often during the day and as the folder numbers progress the less I check them out. The last folder (M5) is for new blogs and sites that I’m checking out. It’s a test phase to see whether after a couple weeks if they’ll make the cut to be placed in one of the other folders.
Why bother reading blogs anyways? There’s a couple reasons for me, first off I want to learn what other people are observing and how they’re thinking – after all I want to take those ideas, make them better and implement them somehow soon. It’s also for content for Link Drop that I’ve been working on for the past couple of months. As the diagram notes, there’s a systematic flow to how I find sites for Link Drop and what I do with the other sites.
The main sources outside of my own tabs is from people mentioning stuff on twitter and from the occasional friend via IM. What has changed from a year or two is that I don’t find that much new stuff on flickr. One guess is that a lot of that content has migrated to FFFFFFFFFFFFound. Inside my tabs there’s very few sites that come from FFFFFFFFFFFFound and believe it or not – tumblr. While I don’t ignore some of the people that use those sites I try to stay from it as a crowd. They’re kind of like business marketing books – everyone is looking at them so the chances of finding something that is unique is diminished by the mass popularity of the services.
Do you have a different method of finding great stuff on the web that isn’t via rss feed readers?
