Joshua Wagner Online

With all the means to get news, blog posts, and almost anything else on the web, which tools do you use?  How efficient are they?  Could they work better?

I was inspired by this post to think about my subscription practices, and I’ve found they could use some work.  For my RSS feeds, I use Google Reader.  I love it.  But the number of articles per day has grown beyond what I can read everyday.  What the above article suggested was to use email subscriptions for your must-read feeds.  This would act as a filter and let you spend less time checking your feed reader.  Cool.

So, my mind is taking that idea one step further.  I find that for the few sites I frequent daily, I end up just checking their actual website.  Why?  Well, I comment on the posts.  To do that, I have to be on their site.  So why go through the RSS middleman?  I did subscribe by email to these sites to see if it helped me at all.  I think it has, at least a little.

I’ve found that I will probably end up with three categories of “feeds.”

1. A-list feeds that I just go to their site, but will also have some subscription to alert me (probably email and/or Twitter),
2. A-list feeds that I really like, but I don’t generally comment on or frequent the site, so I’ll get an email subscription,
3. Other feeds that I like enough to subscribe too, but that I just consume.

Of course, the feeds are always in flux.  If I really start liking a feed in the third category, I’ll jump it somewhere above.

So what’s your way?  Any cool tools you use to make it easier?