I’ve managed to avoid using feed readers for years, but reading wordpress-maven Matt’s post today about switching to Google Reader from Bloglines suddenly made me realize just how much time I waste in the mechanics of web surfing. I just spent the better part of two hours populating Reader with my links and I am already blown away at how much more efficient this is going to be. I literally will be able to do twice as much surfing in half the time. Most of the time saving productivity increase comes from the unified interface; everything is in one place and I can rapidly scan headlines to see what i really want to read. Most blogs helpfully put the whole post into the feed, as well – as do comics like XKCD. And the interface is the same as Gmail, including the ability to “tag” a link with multiple categories and the dynamic interface which means no lag. This is like a revolution. A revelation. Both.
I’m not pleased about investing further into Google. I don’t like all my eggs in one basket, but at least it’s trivial to export my OPML file if I decide to jump ship. In the interim, though, this is incredible.
And whats even cooler is that I am going to setup RSS feeds for searches on PubMed – so I’ll be able to stay up to date on my work as well as my play. Maybe this is the kick in the pants that I needed to get Reference Scan going again…