I thought somebody (somewhere) might be interested in the methodology I use when crafting my timely and well-reasoned posts.
;P
So, here’s what I do: I visit links.
My Favorites are always open on the left side of my IE window. (Yes, IE. Creature of habit, I suppose.) Of the literally dozens of folders, I visit a mere few with alarming frequency: “AMRN Links”, which contains a link to the main board; “Anime”, which I really only use to get to my AnimeSuki bookmark, “Blitzkrieg Web Portals”, which takes me to My Yahoo!, MSN, CNN (occasionally), and (most importantly) Bloglines; “Blogs”, which takes me here and to Blogger to post, as well as to my del.icio.us bookmarks, smugmug, and to my friend’s joural sites; “Blogs – Interesting People”, which takes me to blogs of people I don’t know personally; and “Friends and Family”, which contains links to Box of Bunnies and das brunogekritzel (a message board for fans of Chris Baldwin’s Bruno, and the only webcomic messageboard I frequent. I go there for the discussion, not because Bruno is my favorite comic).
Now, everything in the “Blogs” folder is a subscription in Bloglines, so I actually don’t go to those sites very much unless I’m checking for new comments. Bloglines is what I am typically using when I make a post here.
What I do is this. I’ll go to my Bloglines (click here to see how my [public] feeds look) and start with the “News Aggregates” folder, which currently contains Slashdot and BoingBoing. (MetaFilter used to be in there, but I was getting overwhelmed with news.) I click on anything that sounds interesting, opening a new window, but I stay in Bloglines to finish reading the entire folder. At that point, if I have a lot of new windows open, I’ll go and read the full articles one by one, and one by one decide if I want to make a blog post about them.
After “News Aggregates”, I go to “Odd/Weird”, “Local News”, “Japan News”, “Japanese”, and “Food”. I save “Language” (which currently only contains the Language Log feed) for the end of my more informative reading, because it’s my favorite, and because I always save the best for last.
Once I’m done with my more educational reading, I move to blogs. I don’t necessarily expect to find anything newsworthy here, though it has happened. First I’ll visit “Interesting People”, to see what, for example, Jeff Laitila has to say about life in Japan. And lastly (saving the very best for last, you see), I visit “Friends”.
This is my typical methodology. If I’m in a rush when I’m reading my feeds, often I’ll save the news for later instead, so I’ll have time to think about whether or not I want to post about it. Also, sometimes I’m not in the mood to plow through a Language Log post (they are awesome, but they typically require more “processing power”), so I’ll leave those for later too. But in general, this is how I work.
Oh shit, I was going to put a zillion links in this post, but I have lost track of time and now I’m going to be late for my doctor’s appointment!