SuperCharged Web Surfing

I remember ten years ago going to AltaVista and searching for stuff. I would scrounge through a shoddily list of results until I eventually found a decent site. Then about four years ago Google came along, and suddenly the results of what I searched were exactly what I was looking for. But there was still a problem -- I had to know what to look for. In other words, I had to know what I wanted to find before I found it. I was constantly in a rut of checking the same five or six sites that rarely had an update I wanted to read.

That’s all changed over the last year or so. With sites like delicious, MetaFilter, a real explosion of quality blogs, such as Science Blog, and the spread of RSS feeds, I am now satisfied. I don’t have to know where to look anymore. Other people find good things and tell other people about it. Word of mouth spreads like wildfire. The group knows the gist of what I want to read about before I do. All I have to do is screen the top 50 or so headlines for what really catches my attention and I'm set.

Some of my friends seem to be constantly surprised with all the stuff that I find on the internet. I tell them, “I don’t actually find anything, I just know how to look.” It’s like the difference between panning for gold in a stream and having someone bring gold bars to your house. It takes pretty much no effort. I just set up a dozen RSS feeds off of aggregator sites, and the rest is reading headlines and following stories that are able to immediately catch my attention. There are so many interesting things that I never, ever have time to read them all.

You might think that I am missing things, by just going along with what everyone else out there is reading. But I don’t think that’s the case. I never found this much good information before I used aggregators. The trick now is to know when to stop.