Reality Translation from the original

Content Consumption, Workflow

1 April 2011

For several years I have written articles in which I argue that the future of the internet lies in content aggregation. By content aggregation, I mean the creation and use of tools that allow us to consume the information that interests us. The trend is clear: today, a large share of the web applications we use are content aggregators. In fact, social networks are content aggregators—the content that interests us from the people who interest us.

This trend toward content aggregation has arisen from a problem, perhaps the greatest one the internet faces: information overload. In the early years of the internet there was a great deal of information, but not all of it was relevant to everyone. As it grew in the explosive and exponential way it has, a snowball effect occurred, with ever more information being generated and accumulated. Today there is so much information that anyone can find astonishing quantities about any subject—literally any subject—no matter how absurd, banal, interesting, technical, or bizarre it may be.

If at one stage we devoted ourselves to developing tools for generating content, such as blogs, wikis, and social networks, we now face the challenge of creating tools for consuming it. We generate so much information that it is difficult to consume.

Personally, I am a great consumer of content. Ever since I was a child I have always been curious and interested in many subjects, and in those childhood years I looked up every word I did not understand in the dictionary. I do not like being left with doubts; I like knowing a lot about everything, so, as you can imagine, the internet is a treasure of knowledge for me. On the internet I seek not only knowledge, but also stimulation through interesting photographs, art, typographic design, and fiction—perhaps banalities, but matters of great interest to me.

Having made this introduction, I now want to present my workflow and tools for content consumption, and I will do so through the steps in my process:

Aggregation: Different content aggregators, which are my main sources, save me a large part of the work. There are basically two:

RSS: Thanks to this aggregation protocol, I can subscribe to blogs and digital magazines that interest me. I try to clean up my subscriptions periodically to remove blogs that I no longer enjoy as much, and whenever I find something interesting on the web, I add it. I use two tools for RSS: Google Reader, which is at the centre of the entire process, and the Reeder clients for Mac, iPad, and iPhone.
Twitter: The people I follow on Twitter are people who have something to say, people whose points of view I find interesting, and, to me, the most valuable things are the links they share. From those links, I can get a great deal of content that interests me. I use several tools for Twitter: Twitter for Mac, iPad, and iPhone, Tweetmag, and Tweet Library.

Filtering: When I receive information through my aggregators, I filter out the content that interests me, generally articles or images that I want to keep or read later. I do this filtering by sending the content that interests me to a web application with iPhone and iPad clients called Read It Later, hereafter referred to as RIL.
Storage, organization, and consumption: RIL is at the centre of my content consumption. Once I have all the articles or information in the application, I classify them with tags. I use tags for each subject, for example: Apple, HTML, web, tech, typography, design, and so on. RIL allows me to view the information in graphic mode, meaning with the original layout and style of the website, or as plain text, which is generally more comfortable and practical. In RIL, I store not only articles that interest me, but also tutorials or important references for my work.
Curation: As I consume the content, I carry out a curation process; that is, I select the articles I found most interesting and that I want to comment on or share, and I store them under a tag called “publish.”
Distribution: I distribute the content stored in RIL under “publish” through Twitter or through my personal blog.

As you can see, in this process I become an aggregator myself. In short, the internet is becoming a content-digestion system that works cyclically.