How to read

Last April I blogged about Stephen King's advice to would-be writers:

"...read a lot and write a lot."

This remains relevant for bloggers and anyone else who wants to read a lot online, but what is the best way to do it?

This may seem like a stupid question, but actually whilst it sounds trivial it has taken me some time to refine and get right.

Apologies in advance:- this post is technical and detailed. It might well bore you to tears or insult your intelligence and tell you a load of stuff you already know (in which case please skip it). However, I hope it might help a couple of people who are trying to solve a similar problem to the one I had.

Of course, you may well have your own method which works for you... in which case please let me know in the comments.

The problem for me is information overload. I read or subscribe to quite a lot of stuff online:-

• probably fifty or so legal blogs
• a selection of technology and iPad blogs
• legal news sources like Legal Week and the Law Society Gazette
• local newspapers and other press
• legal updates on various corporate law subjects
• random blogs from friends and family
• Google and Twitter search results for various keywords

The traffic varies, but there can easily be 200 stories from these sources in the course of a day. How do you even get started working through them and deciding what to read?

The first step has to be to use RSS feeds to avoid having to visit each of these sites every day to check for updates.

Incidentally, monitoring Google and Twitter search isn't just about social media mentions and "buzz". Even if you couldn't care less about social media you should take a few minutes to set up RSS feeds for your firm's name and some common variations in light of the recent SRA guidance on law firm identity fraud and plug them into an RSS reader so that you are instantly alerted to anything untoward.

All of the blogs and sites I read have an RSS feed. There are loads of ways to read them, but my starting point is to subscribe to the feeds in Google Reader which is Google's browser-based RSS feed reader.

I don't use the Google reader interface much; instead I use the account to sync my feeds to a number of more useable readers (I use FeedDemon for Windows and Reeder on the iPad mainly) which means that I can pick up my feeds and mark them as read on any device and it will sync to the others.

So, I now have all my updates in one place, but I need to weed out the ones which are actually of interest.

This is a pretty quick process. I skim through the titles in a couple of minutes and add the articles which look worthwhile to my Instapaper account. Most RSS feed readers let you do this... with FeedDemon it just needs a click on the "share" button and Reeder has a great swipe to send to Instapaper function which speeds thing up no end.

Instapaper is a great service which saves web pages, blog posts etc. for later reading (and also downloads a version for offline reading). As well as a web interface it is available in app form for iPad, iPhone and other devices.

Most Twitter clients (including the official iPad and iPhone apps and the lovely new Mac client) allow you to save links from tweets into Instapaper too... so if I see something on Twitter which I want to follow up I will hit the "read later" button to send it to Instapaper.

Instapaper is my reading list for the day, which means that at this point I have to actually start reading things and deciding what (if anything) to do with them.

Items I want to blog about or tweet at a later stage get moved into folders I have set up in Instapaper for this purpose.

Anything which I read, but doesn't need any further action I just archive in Instapaper using the "archive" option.

Pieces which I really want to save (case notes, know-how or general inspiration) I mark as "starred" in Instapaper. This saves them in a favourites folder, but also filters them down to the final level of my filing system.

Marking items with a star automatically adds them to my pinboard.in account. Pinboard.in is a social bookmarking site (although it describes itself as "anti-social bookmarking") which allows you to save bookmarked pages and posts for the future and also share the ones you want to make public.

You can (and should) tag the bookmarks so that you can call up all your bookmarks tagged with "Twitter" (or whatever) when you need to.

Pinboard is my library of stuff which I want to keep (and possibly share). I used to use Delicious, but I moved to Pinboard when rumours circulated that Delicious might be closing down. In the end I prefer its pared-down interface.

You have to make a small payment to get an account (the fee increases with the user base to cover costs and keep things manageable), but personally I think it is well worth it.

As well as importing starred Instapaper items, you can also choose to import favourited Tweets or Google Reader items automatically, which may work well for your own workflow.

Both Instapaper and Pinboard.it have add-ins for the popular browsers too so that you can press a button on your browser toolbar to add pages or articles for later reading.

This filtering system has enabled me to get a handle on all the blog posts and news I follow... and it has evolved by trying lots of different services (or combinations of services) along the way.

It won't be perfect for everyone, but if you are struggling to keep on top of your reading list then it might be worth giving it a shot.