Sunday, March 01, 2015

Watcha read'ng?

It is not easy to find great sources of information. We all know that you are more likely to find Fair and Balanced information on TheDailyShow than watching FoxNews. 

Attention grabbing and shock evoking headlines are no longer the purview of CNN. Also The Huffington post is all about hunting for clicks and advertising dollars. Disappointment surely awaits you when clicking on the bold red all-caps headline articles. Fear inducing headlines or titles with a specific number of items are just everywhere. Can we get some boring to the point titles? 

And please, let the news be original for a change. Lots of websites run the copy-modify-slightly-and-paste machines all day and night. And it is not just limited to the US. Techcrunch, ReCode or SFgate articles show up within hours on the websites of Belgian news outlets, translated into Dutch. 

Finding original blogs is not easy either. Try to find a product review blog or the personal opinion of a user of the product on their personal blog. Nowadays, every company or product spawns a bunch of blogs-in-sheep-skin. 

So, where do I go for my daily information dose, beyond books, Twitter, ArsTechnica, HackerNews or Wired? Here are my to-go-to tools and sites: 
  • Medium - is a new "blogging" platform. I find great articles there. (I've written a few on medium as well: http://www.medium.com/@waffletchnlgy)
  • Pocket- is my favorite tool to save articles, using their Chrome plug-in, to read later in the day. 
  • Flipboard - curates various magazines in a tablet friendly format.
  • Feedly - is an old school newsfeed reader. I switched to Feedly after the death of Google Reader and being disappointed by Digg's reader. Sadly, fewer and fewer websites advertise an RSS feed. Here's a list of the websites and blogs I read in Feedly: 




If you have any interesting original content sites, let me know. 

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