Assessors, Navigators and Aggregators

One of the chief pleasures of the internet is the serendipitous discovery of sights and facts previously unseen. A few of the tools I use to do this, mostly on my iPad, are Stumbleupon, Flipboard, Instapaper, Pocket, and Zite. (Hmm, see the trend? Face-book, Stumble-upon, Flip-board, Insta-paper, You-Tube...there must be a name for this enthusiasm for naming your company/app with two evocative words instead of the good old brands like Ford, Black's, Kodak, GM, IBM...but this is tangential to my point, sorry).

Stumbleupon and Flipboard both operate on similar principles: You tell the app what kinds of things interest you and then, in the case of Stumble, you are sent on a corkscrew ride through the interweb. Things are a little hit-and-miss with Stumbleupon but the chances of happening upon something truly interesting keeps me coming back. Stumbleupon also asks you to give a thumbs up or down for any given site you are taken to and subsequently refines it's searches to better suit your tastes. So less stumbling as it "learns" you. A terrific time waster.

Flipboard also asks for your interests and then presents sites and articles that it figures you will be interested in reading. Instead of taking you to a specific site, Flipboard shows you a number of sites in the form of a magazine cover. If something interests you, you click and read and then return to the app to peruse more pages. Yet another app, which I don't often use, is Zite: highly recommended by various sites as an aggregator of your personal interests. Zite works pretty much in the same way as Flipboard, including presenting material in a magazine format. It would be only a matter of taste as to which app you choose to use. Oh, heck! Why not live on the edge and download both?

InstaPaper is one of my favourites. It is an aggregator of long articles from such esteemed online and hard copy publications, inter-alia, as the NY Times, New Yorker, The Boston Review, GQ, Vanity Fair, Foreign Affairs and The American Scholar. It is a great app to use if you take transit as it will display articles in their entirety even when your device is not online.

InstaPaper is related closely to a web site known as Pocket, formerly known as Read it Later. This is a service which will save articles/pages from anywhere on the web with one click, allowing you to come back to these saved articles at a later time when you find time to read them. I guess this assumes that you are not going to be rooting around the web all the time, but will take time and read the articles you have archived. My relationship with Pocket is sometimes hot and sometimes cold.

 

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