
Ask HN: How do you organize the online "content" you consume? - drenei
I'm re-constructing my process for collecting, sorting, using and archiving content from the numerous feeds, websites and links I go through during a day.<p>The amount of things that I have coming in can be overwhelming and I'm trying to find that balance point where I sort and retain useful things, without spending a huge amount of time on it.<p>How do you do it? Any tips you can share?
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drenei
The best process for me at the moment seems to be using 3 tools in the
following way. The 3 tools are: Google Reader (through a mac app - Gruml),
Instapaper (a bookmarking service thats great for text) and Diigo (a
bookmarking service).

\- I go through Google Reader once a day scanning for useful things. Anything
that I can't go process in a few minutes or don't want to deal with
immediately I save.

\- Anything I come across during the day (from emails, friends, colleagues,
etc) that I want to look at later also gets saved.

\- I save things in two ways: articles/text to Instapaper, and everything else
to a 'temporary' bookmark folder on my browser.

\- When I have some time, 3 to 5 times a week, I'll read through the articles
on Instapaper. I'll archive the articles after I read them on Instapaper,
deleting any that weren't useful.

\- 2 to 4 times a month I'll go through the 'temporary folder'. Deleting
anything that isn't useful and and using diigo to archive everything that is.

\- The key thing so far for me is to make sure I relentlessly remove anything
that I am reasonably sure isn't useful especially from my RSS reader.

Its not as simple as I'd like it to be, mostly because I'm using two archiving
services. I like instapaper's ability to easily convert articles into a
readable format. At the same time for organizing and archiving everything else
diigo works great.

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frossie
I mostly use Google Reader. I use the shareaholic firefox extension to add
non-RSS sites to my Google Reader shared items, so I can search for them later
- I don't share publically.

To a lesser extent: evernote, readitlater, and firefox bookmark folders.

My mantra: don't archive what will still be there tomorrow, and don't sort
what you can search for.

~~~
pyre
> _don't archive what will still be there tomorrow_

Websites (or just specific content on a site) are not guaranteed to be there
tomorrow. They just _probably_ will be there tomorrow.

~~~
frossie
_Websites (or just specific content on a site) are not guaranteed to be there
tomorrow_

Agreed - it's your time downloading and organising stuff versus the
possibility that it might one day go away; for me, it's rarely a contest. I
can imagine certain situations (eg. you are a publicity agent saving public
mentions of your client) where it really is your business to preserve such
things, but I don't fall in that category and I doubt most people do.

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thinker
Shameless plug - but worth checking out to solve your problem - we've built a
website called Thinkpanda which lets you save notes, links, files, rss feeds
and even etherpads in "collections". All your collections are a click away and
we even aggregate content from all your collections (and those you are
following) into one meta-feed.

We're starting off targeting the academic market (students, researchers) but
have found it pretty useful for organizing interest-based links and having
general discussions as well.

Check it out <http://thinkpanda.com> and any feedback is appreciated!

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mrlyc
To organise my music and video collections and save information from surfing
the web and the 77 RSS feeds and 160 podcasts I subscribe to, I use a
partition which is structured as follows:

    
    
      multimedia
        downloads
          torrents
        ebooks
          to read
          to keep
        music
          to select
          to keep
        speech
          to hear
          to keep
        text
        video
          to see
          to keep
    

The "to keep" directories have subdirectories named after authors, bands,
genres, movies and podcasts. The "text" directory is for saved web pages as
well as normal text files.

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briandoll
Evernote. I heard the hype and ignored it for a while. I tried it a few months
ago on a whim and have been hooked ever since.

We come across a lot of data. Lots of it is interesting, but we don't need it
right now. I save dozens of articles a day in Evernote and search it first
when researching a topic I'm interested in. It's likely I've saved some great
posts on the subject, but haven't gotten around to reading them yet.

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nreece
Synced Bookmarks with Google Chrome

Synced Notes with Evernote

Synced Docs/Files with Dropbox

