When I first started reading blogs, I would just keep links to them in my Favorites list, and read them from the start of my list to the finish. Of course, I kept adding more and more blogs, and pretty soon I just couldn't keep up with all of them, and couldn't afford to spend time loading a blog that hadn't been updated. Then I found Bloglines, which allowed me to bundle all my reading into one page, displaying only updated material. And that was a good solution, for a while - but as I kept adding more and more feeds, I once again ran into a problem. There was just simply too much to read. If I didn't visit Bloglines every day, and spend at least an hour, then I would find that the new blog posts and news stories just kept piling up, and piling up, and piling up; if I took a couple of days off from the computer there would be thousands of posts to read. There was just no way that I could read all of them on a given day.
What I needed was just the most recent postings from a combination of all of those feeds, not all the postings from all the feeds. I didn't need to see what Instapundit or Drudge had written three days ago, as that stuff was already buried under a mountain of new posts. However, I couldn't just aggregate everything together into one giant feed either, otherwise the most recent posts would all be Instapundit and Drudge.
I had made a step in this direction with my Space Feeds site, which is good if all you want to read is space stuff. However, I needed something a little more general so that I wouldn't end up spending hours and hours on Bloglines.
And, I figured that if I was encountering information overload, then chances are that other people were, too. What is needed is basically a small-scale newspaper, updated continuously, where people can get a snapshot of the news and latest blog entries, in a number of categories.
So, I decided to make my own newspaper on Blogger. The result is Speedy News. On that page, you will find everything that one would expect from a newspaper, plus blog feeds. Included are the latest feeds from Pajamas Media, some big blogs, some of my favorite blogs, world news, US news, science and technology news, space news, science blog feeds, business news, environment news, health news, sports, entertainment news, and travel news. Clicking on the title of a news item will bring up the first paragraph or more of the story, and clicking on the >> symbol beside a title will open up the web page from which that item originated.In the sidebar are links to the Craigslist classified ads, the Darkgate Comic Slurper, Weather Underground, WebSudoku, Horoscopes, a list of links to other media sites and some cool links.
I figure that if Speedy News catches on, then lots of people will want to put a button for it on their blogs or websites. So, here is the necessary code for the Speedy News button:
It is my hope that the Speedy News site will be a useful tool for people who are pressed for time but still want to stay informed. No more wading through hundreds of items in a feed aggregator, just the very latest news.
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