without an e

Reddit Out, Reader In [07/07/2007 15:15:25]

I recently replaced reddit with Google Reader as my main source of interesting links.

I used to be a big fan of reddit, but as its popularity grew, the links on the front page became more and more banal: one part cute and wacky fluff, one part paranoia. It still coughs up the occasional interesting link, but whenever I visit the home page, I have to sort through 80 headlines I've already seen to find the one or two new, good links.

I thought it might be nice to see a more blog-like format, with a continuous, ordered stream of the popular links. I know I could just click "hide" on every link as I went through, but
that seemed clunky, so I decided to try just reading the reddit RSS feed through Google reader. In the end, I wound up ditching the reddit links entirely.

google reader: a nice way to read

Google Reader is a feed aggregator. You tell it what feeds you want to read (which is usually as easy as visiting the site in firefox and clicking the little orange square in the address bar) and then google takes care of monitoring the feed for you, and showing you the aggregated feeds.

Reader's interface looks (at first) like a normal blog: you get the list of all your feeds on the left, and on the right you get the entries (either separated by feed, or as a single integrated stream).

What makes Reader different from a blog or even an aggregator like planet is the addition of workflow: one entry is always highlighted with a thick border, and by pressing the arrow keys (or various letters), you can move the focus from entry to entry. Then there are keyboard shortcuts to visit the original article, email the entry, mark it unread (it gets marked read automatically for you) or tag the item with a star - similar to bookmarking it.

I started with the reddit feed, then went through my bookmarks and loaded all the blogs I read into it. After a few days, I dropped the reddit feed, because it became very obvious that reddit links were so much less useful.

reddit: where bad headlines win

It seems to me that the links that do best on reddit are the ones that are the most outlandish and confusing. For example, here are some of the meaningless headlines currently on the top 100 page at reddit:

Most of the others are political gossip. There's hardly anything on the front page that's actually usable, and most of the headlines turn out to be overhyped or taken out of context. I found that seeing these headlines inside Reader's stream really irritated me. Most individual authors that I like have decent titles and even if not, you can usually see the full text of the story in Reader. But with reddit, you just get the headlines, and I soon realized that clicking a reddit headline in reader was almost always a waste of time.

I should clarify that I'm talking about the main reddit here. I do still read the science and programming subreddits. These have a much higher signal to noise ratio, and seem to have more relevant, accurate headlines. Some of the programming links are even things on which I can take immediate action, since I'm a programmer.

saving time

If you just have a list of blogs you visit, you've got to do a lot of clicking and tabbing and waiting for pages to load, and looking at pages that haven't changed since the last time you saw them.

This sort of time waster is what prompted me to build the first ever weblog monitoring system (linkwatcher.com). Of course, there were only a handful of blogs back then, and no feeds, but at least you would know the site had been updated before you clicked. (Well, usually - Linkwatcher notices any change in the page, even programmatically generated timestamps or randomly generated quotes.)

Of course, modern feed readers like Google Reader blow those early aggregators away, since they only show you blogs you subscribe to. Also, since the actual articles (or excerpts) are usually included in the feeds, there's very little time lost waiting for outside pages to load.

We're only talking about a few seconds saved here, but I find that by outsourcing those few seconds of work to Reader, I'm actually much more likely to read the blogs I like. Before, I had plenty of blogs bookmarked, but rarely bothered to go through them all.

Scoble's Video Demo

If you haven't tried Google Reader (or some other feed reader) for yourself, I definitely encourage you to try it.

You might also want to check out this 12 minute video of Tim Ferris (author of The Four Hour Workweek) interviewing prominent blogger Robert Scoble on his web surfing habits. Scoble tracks over 600 feeds in his reader, and he does a great job of showing off exactly how to use Google Reader. In fact, this was the video that inspired me to give Google Reader a try.

Post a comment:
name: (shows up on site)
link: (shows up on site)
mail: (for michal only)
no html allowed yet. sorry: