Over the years, I have slowly developed a habit to read. But this has been more related to the online world rather than books / novels etc. May be it comes with the time spent with computers these days.
A challenging part of reading online stuff is to be able to find the right articles to read, ironically because the web has grown so large. It is easy to find a lot of articles (you can regularly visit various websites, read latest news etc.), but one will ideally like all articles to be relevant and interesting. At the same time, you will not like to miss on stuff that is 'good to know', but might not be as interesting.
I find 2 tools very useful for these purposes. One is a RSS reader that you are comfortable with. You can then subscribe to all kinds of websites that serve you the kind of articles that you want. Just subscribe to a website, and see if you have been actually opening up articles from the site once they come as a RSS feed. That will give a good sense of the usefulness of the website over a period of time. You can follow blogs and a range of stuff. You can also track news items, videos etc. about certain topics you want. For that, you can search for the topic on search engines or video sites, and add the RSS feed for that search in your reader.
You can find the complete list of the feeds I follow on the left hand side of this blog.
A very useful way of finding great articles is to subscribe to sites/ blogs of people who share links to things they have been reading. Some of the articles that I most liked have come from this kind of source.
For the sites which do not have RSS feeds, there are other websites that offer to setup feeds, so that it is easy to track them. However, somehow, I have not managed to use them well. In this case, I use our very own browser bookmarks (the 2nd tool), but then have the additional task of regularly going to my bookmarks to see if there are any updates. Hopefully, such bookmarks are not required to a large extent and are manageable.
If I find a great great article/ quote, I share it in 3 ways - 1. share it with your friends who follow you on the Reader which you use for the RSS feeds, 2. Facebook and 3. Twitter. Sometimes, I go back to these shared items and more often that not, feel what a gem it is, even now.
A challenging part of reading online stuff is to be able to find the right articles to read, ironically because the web has grown so large. It is easy to find a lot of articles (you can regularly visit various websites, read latest news etc.), but one will ideally like all articles to be relevant and interesting. At the same time, you will not like to miss on stuff that is 'good to know', but might not be as interesting.
I find 2 tools very useful for these purposes. One is a RSS reader that you are comfortable with. You can then subscribe to all kinds of websites that serve you the kind of articles that you want. Just subscribe to a website, and see if you have been actually opening up articles from the site once they come as a RSS feed. That will give a good sense of the usefulness of the website over a period of time. You can follow blogs and a range of stuff. You can also track news items, videos etc. about certain topics you want. For that, you can search for the topic on search engines or video sites, and add the RSS feed for that search in your reader.
You can find the complete list of the feeds I follow on the left hand side of this blog.
A very useful way of finding great articles is to subscribe to sites/ blogs of people who share links to things they have been reading. Some of the articles that I most liked have come from this kind of source.
For the sites which do not have RSS feeds, there are other websites that offer to setup feeds, so that it is easy to track them. However, somehow, I have not managed to use them well. In this case, I use our very own browser bookmarks (the 2nd tool), but then have the additional task of regularly going to my bookmarks to see if there are any updates. Hopefully, such bookmarks are not required to a large extent and are manageable.
If I find a great great article/ quote, I share it in 3 ways - 1. share it with your friends who follow you on the Reader which you use for the RSS feeds, 2. Facebook and 3. Twitter. Sometimes, I go back to these shared items and more often that not, feel what a gem it is, even now.
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