Wake up call!

I posted a while back about how people get and handle their news (News Junky). Well, I got some feedback that I didn't expect.

A family friend emailed me in response that he watches various news channels and reads a few newspapers.

My parents don't get any further than the AOL homepage, watch the 10 p.m. news, and read the paper (The Miami Herald) on the weekends.

My younger siblings spend their time online browsing Myspace and other social networking sites, which I guess qualifies as person-specific news.

I had to explain to a friend of mine what RSS does.

Not so much what I had expected to find out. Sometimes I pay more attention to innovation in technology when I should be paying attention to people.

RSS aggregate and search

Fredi Bach made a really cool RSS feed aggregator.

"Well, basically this is a feed aggregator. That means it takes the headlines from other sites, mostly blogs and archives them into a database to make them easily searchable even if the original feed was updated. Additionally to those “normal” features it shares with other good feed aggregators, jMe let's you select feed items and arrange them in a collection. This collection can than be posted to other websites, weblogs or message boards."

The tool includes some pretty advanced search techniques, and the collected feeds include posts on OS X, Web 2.0 & programming.

What an interesting way to collect and then find information!

News Junky

I get my news through RSS feeds. Sometimes it feels like its an IV; I get something like 200 messages a day. A lot of them I can just skim through or read the headlines on. But keeping up still takes up quite a chunk of my day. Sometimes I have to mark an interesting post for a time when I can devote my full attention to its contents.

I subscribe to news, linguistics, journalism, technology, Internet and other blogs, websites, and online news portals. All in the attempt to make sure that I know what is going on in the various arenas that capture my interest.

As a journalist, I have to pay attention to what is going on in the world. As a "net girl" I also pay attention to innovations in technology and online.

You know what? Some days, it's too much to absorb. Some days, it makes my brain hurt.

I feel kinda silly asking this, since I don't think anyone reads this blog yet:
What do you consider to be the most important sources of information? For whatever interests you, where do you go to keep up? How, oh how, do you handle the insanity?!