hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0909.txt

Episode: 909
Title: HPR0909: KC0058 : Streampunking with Instapaper
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0909/hpr0909.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 04:47:47

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2
On the edge of real and cyberspace, there's one place you can go.
On the edge of real and cyberspace, there's one place you can go.
On the edge of real and cyberspace, there's one place you can go.
On the edge of real and cyberspace, there's one place you can go.
On the edge of real and cyberspace, there's one place you can go.
Hey guys and girls, great to have you back on the show again or great to be back on the show again, great to have you listening again, that's how it works.
I hope you had a great new year and I wish you all the best for 2012 and we are back on a weekly schedule this time with the podcast on Nightwise.com.
It's been a pretty busy week, I've been, you know, with the holidays and stuff tinkering and trying stuff out and I've got a whole new range of cool tips and tricks that I wanted to share with you and today is one of them.
I've been working on a little project over the last couple of days and when I was finally done with it, I thought, I gotta tell the Nightwise.com listeners, I gotta tell them to wise guys and wise girls as we call you.
So that's what we're going to do today. We are going to talk about stream pumpkin, the art of shaping your information streams and having them well prepared and delivered to you in the way that you can consume them whenever you want to.
Kind of sounds very, very floaty, fluffy, but it's actually quite technical and very, very practical. So we are going to get right into the meat of the matter and talk about stream pumpkin.
Times have changed. I remember back in the day when I was just a young lad on the internet and that really sounds old. Information was power. The more information you could find, the more powerful you became.
It was a time that we had not one, but several search engines that we would use to find all of the stuff that we wanted to find.
Yahoo, if Yahoo didn't find it, you'd use hotpot and if hotpot didn't find it, you'd use Lycos and if Lycos didn't find it, you'd use Webcrawler and if Webcrawler didn't find it, you gave up because back then there was no Google and there was no Bing.
These days, it's a whole different story. We are absolutely flooded with information. There is so much information coming our way that it is no longer an art of finding information, but filtering information.
If I take a look at just the streams of information that are coming my way, I've got stuff in Google that gets pushed my way.
I've got RSS feeds, I'm subscribed to, I've got Twitter, I've got Facebook, I've got Google Plus. Every single day I get flooded with tons and tons and tons of information.
And the information that I get flooded with is already pre-filtered. I mean, the information I get from Google is the stuff I search.
The information I get from my RSS feeds is the stuff I subscribe to. The information I get from my podcasts is the stuff that I subscribe to.
The information of Twitter is the information of people I am subscribed to or friends of them or retweets of them.
The information I get on Facebook, same thing, Google Plus, same thing. I mean, there are literally thousands of items of information that bombard me every single day.
Of course, if you still use the old paradigm where more feeds is more knowledge is more power, you will pretty soon be absolutely swarmed with information and you won't know what to do with it.
So the art of managing that information is becoming more and more important.
The art of literally fine-tuning those streams of information to exactly match what you need so you can consume that information when you want it, how you want it, where you want it is becoming quite a little odd.
Let's say you really like cat videos. I mean, really like them.
If you just would subscribe to every single cat video out there, I think you would have 24 hours a day filled with cat videos.
And then I'm talking only the cat videos from YouTube, but there is also Vimeo and God knows what their cat videos on this planet that are in such a great number.
They will keep you entertained 24-7 for the rest of 2012, at least, and then you will have spent an entire year watching cat videos, and you will have probably died of an overdose.
So what do we do with cat videos? Well, it would be nice to stream down that information feed of cat videos who only the cat videos you like,
and even trickle that down further to a number that you can consume, and kind of cherry pick the best cat videos so you can choose to see only the best only when you want it to,
and then probably on a device that you want to consume them on.
That would be the art of stream-punking, pumpkin, your information streams, and that's exactly what we're going to talk about today.
So we are going to manage our information streams to kind of call them down in a way that we can consume them, and then we're going to stream-punk that a little bit further to make sure that we can consume them not only where we cannot only consume the information that we want to consume,
but also where we want to consume it, when we want to consume it, and how.
Today is going to be a little practical lesson in stream-punking 101.
Welcome to the digital revolution.
The first thing that you need is an account on Google Reader.
Now, if you still remember the show Bookmark Oblivion, we talked in-depth about Google Reader as a RSS Reader to subscribe to our channel.
If you don't know what RSS is, you're probably not able to listen to that podcast, to this podcast, but I'll just state it out.
RSS is a technology that enables you to subscribe to the content of a certain website and have updates of that content pushed towards you, towards your RSS clients, and displayed in a way that you can easily read through it.
So, instead of clicking around and going to all the different websites, the information streams of those websites come to you.
It's kind of like you got this podcast if you're listening on iTunes or a podcatcher.
I put out a new episode, instead of going to my website every single day and checking if there's a new episode, your RSS Reader gets notified that I have put out a new episode, and the episode is automatically downloaded,
to your podcatcher. That's how RSS works.
And Google Reader is actually a web-based RSS Reader.
It's a web page on which you have subscribed to all of the other RSS feeds of your favorite websites, and they are kind of displayed in a very easy way right in front of you.
So, you can easily click through the link in the description below.
So, you can easily click through the link in the description below.
So, if you're subscribed to all of the other RSS feeds of your favorite websites, and they are kind of displayed in a very easy way right in front of you.
So, you can easily click through all the new articles on that website without having to go to every single website to take a look at the articles.
It saves you a lot of time in surfing around.
An RSS Reader is imperative these days. If you like a website instead of going to that website, just subscribe to that website, and then use your central RSS Reader to consume all of that content.
Google Reader is a web-based RSS Reader. I prefer it because it kind of takes all the boxes of a cross-platform slider.
I can use it on any device, check, on any operating system, check, from any location, check. It works everywhere.
It's a cloud-based service, and yes, it's part of the great big Google.
So, what I do is I take all of the favorite websites that I know, and I put them into Google Reader.
That's kind of nice.
The one thing that I don't like about the new Google Reader is that there is less functionality than the old one.
The new Google Reader, the old Google Reader had some nice functionalities in kind of making your own RSS feeds that the new Google Reader no longer has, which I think is a real bummer.
Let me just scope out to you how I use Google Reader.
I've got my Google Reader set up, and I've got my favorite RSS feeds put into little folders.
I've got a folder technology, I've got a folder podcast, I've got a folder news, stuff like that.
All of the RSS feeds are not neatly organized into folders.
I use a Google widget, which is called a little, well, a bookmarklet, actually, that I've dragged to the top of my bookmark's bar on my browsers.
And that is subscribe in Google Reader.
So if I come across a website that I think is interesting, I just hit that little bookmarklet, and the RSS feed is already is automatically put into Google Reader, and I can subscribe to it there.
So that's really easy.
There used to be two other bookmarklets.
One would be note in Google Reader, and one would be star in Google Reader, if I'm not mistaken.
That was really, really convenient, because then I could add individual articles to Google Reader on a separate RSS feed and just read through those specific articles.
That is no longer possible in the new Google Reader, which is a real bummer.
And then you would also have the option star in Google Reader, which would kind of mark a certain article in a certain RSS feed as a special article.
But those things have come and gone.
So it's not really worth talking about, because I could do some fancy things with that, but I'll show you a little bit later on.
Now, what I mostly do is I set Google Reader as my homepage.
Instead of launching my browser and going straight to Google, I just go to Google Reader.
And in Google Reader, you have your start items feed, which is all of the items from all of your RSS feeds that you have started as interested as interesting.
So what happens is I open up Google Reader and I immediately see all of the start items that I noted.
So if I, you know, in a previous session, start some items where I said, OK, I've got to check this out a little bit later on.
I can really see my start start items and go through them.
That kind of helps me not to surf around aimlessly on the internet going from dig to Reddit and stuff like that.
So you open up your browser and you immediately have the stuff that you find interesting called down.
You know the triangle of death, you know, go to Facebook, go to Reddit, go to Twitter, go to Facebook, go to Reddit, go to Twitter.
You know, that is kind of the pattern of surfing around aimlessly until you find some information that you like.
But this is kind of more to the point where I just get all of the stuff that I've already subscribed to filter down the internet's kind of narrowed down for me when I boot up with boot up my browser, which is kind of convenient.
Now, you have all of these items in Google Reader and there are several things that you can do with these items on Google Reader.
Just let me open up my own Google Reader here.
What you can actually do when you see an article is that you can plus one that article so you can publicly endorse it.
You can share it on Google Plus.
You can email it to somebody else.
You could keep it as an unread item or you can add a tag to it or a star, which is convenient to organize your information for I personally use the Google Plus.
The Google Plus share option a lot because if you if you subscribe or admit to your circles on Google Plus, you get all of the articles that I tag as interesting in Google Reader.
That kind of makes Google Plus really technical and I kind of like it because I used to share out a lot of those articles or interesting articles from my RSS feeds to Facebook.
But I do feel that the audience on Facebook at the moment doesn't get all of the techy stuff and the guys on Google Plus do.
So from there, from that article, you can easily share something on Google Plus or email it to somebody else or you can even send it to Facebook or Twitter, which is nice.
But what if you don't have the time to consume that media right there, right then?
I don't really like to read stuff on a screen.
Then you have another option.
You can send it to Instapaper.
Instapaper is a service on the internet that allows you to push certain articles towards Instapaper.
Instapaper kind of does what Google Reader does. It takes out all of the formatting and puts it in a format that is nicely readable and then stores it for later.
Now why is this important? Well Instapaper kind of makes, as it says, it instantly makes a paper out of a certain article and you can choose what to do with that paper.
Now Instapaper is a service, let me just open it up here, Instapaper.com, that allows you to read stuff anywhere.
And that is the second step to our little stream-punking adventure.
So I talked about Google Reader, and I talked about how I use it, and I talked about how I use it to manage my streams and output my streams, and one of those outputs is Instapaper.
And we are going to get into that right now.
And we are going to get into that right now.
And we are going to get into that right now.
And we are going to get into that right now.
And we are going to get into that right now.
And we are going to get into that right now.
And we are going to get into that right now.
And we are going to get into that right now.
And we are going to get into that right now.
And we are going to get into that right now.
And we are going to get into that right now.
And we are going to get into that right now.
And we are going to get into that right now.
And we are going to get into that right now.
Instapaper is the agent of my progress, the nation.
I come across several articles that I think is, oh, that's really interesting.
I got to read that.
But you know, you're behind the computer.
And when you're behind the computer, you're kind of tempted to do all kinds of other stuff as well.
I mean, you come across this great article that you really want to read.
And you say like, darn, I wish I had the time.
And you start reading it, which is not really convenient on a big screen,
but whatever.
And then you get a tweet, or then you get an instant message,
or then there's this other website popping up,
or then you get interrupted.
And because there are so much, there are so much ways of being distracted,
you don't end up reading the article at all.
So Instapaper is your agent of progress, the nation.
There is, you can sign up to the service.
And the service is initially free.
You can do it with a free account.
And then you get a couple of bookmarks.
Again, bookmarks.
These bookmarks are little snippets of code that are actually a little bookmark
with a piece of code on it.
You copy the piece of code and add it to a bookmark and put it in your bookmarks bar.
This adds functionality.
We talked about the Add to Google Reader bookmarklets in the previous chapter,
which adds a certain RSS feed from a website into Google Reader.
And the Instapaper stuff does the same thing.
Add to Instapaper is a bookmarklet that you press.
And then the article that is currently on the screen gets added to Instapaper.
With Google Reader, you can do the same thing straight out of Google Reader,
basically taking an article from your RSS feeds and saying Add to Instapaper.
Interesting? Yes. Why?
Well, Instapaper allows you to consume that content whenever you want to.
If even if the article goes online, Instapaper will offline.
Instapaper still has a copy, which is pretty darn useful.
So Instapaper allows you to kind of aggregate information out of your Google Reader
or from any website that you're visiting, strips down all the ads,
and puts it into a readable format.
That it displays on its website.
So you log into Instapaper and you can just browse through all of the articles
that you have Instapapered or marked to read in Instapaper.
And then you can do some more stuff with that.
So creating an account is free.
What you need is an email address entering mine right now.
And a login and a password.
And what it does, it gives you a list of all of the articles that you have marked.
Interesting. It kind of makes you feel like Google Reader.
But it's kind of different.
What you can do is you can organize them into folders and edit those folders.
That's everything's not a problem.
You just click on the article and you get a kind of paper-like view of the article.
If you click on the article, you go to the website.
But you can also click on the text-only version of the article,
which gives you the text-only version of the article.
And with long articles, that's really nice.
I mean, if you click on the link, you go to the website.
And you see all of the ads and all of the moving stuff.
But if you click on the text link, you just get the text.
Now you can share this via email or you can go to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr,
Pinboard, EverNote, by linking those accounts to InstaPaper from the website.
But you can also make a RSS feed out of the items you have added to InstaPaper.
Pretty interesting.
Now, it's all nice and dandy.
That's not really a problem.
But it doesn't really ring my bell.
I mean, I want to read this when I wanted
where I wanted it.
So InstaPaper comes with several applications.
InstaPaper applications for your iPad, for your Android devices, for your iPhone.
Which is really nice.
So if you're not on the InstaPaper page and you still want to read those articles,
just install the application on your mobile device.
Especially InstaPaper for the iPad is really nice.
If you've already made an account, it will synchronize the articles that you have downloaded
or that you have marked for read later in InstaPaper and will display them on the iPad.
Now, because it removes all of the ads, it's really convenient to read through it.
For the iPhone, there's the same version for Android.
There's also a version really nice ways of just taking a look at all of those articles
you marked to read in InstaPaper and you get to text only versions.
Nice.
Isn't it?
Well, really.
It doesn't really not.
On nice, I like it.
But it's the InstaPaper app.
Perhaps you want to do it differently.
Well, as I said, InstaPaper also makes an RSS feed out of the items that you've tagged.
As interesting.
And these also work with other feed readers, other RSS readers.
So the items that you put into InstaPaper get kind of made into a separate feed
and you can push out that feed to another RSS reader.
So stuff like polls and reader and net newswire and whatever RSS feeder that you are using
allow you to read through those InstaPaper feeds.
So when the functionality from Google, a reader mark in Google Reader went away,
I had no way to quickly mark a certain article on a certain website,
which I didn't want to subscribe to.
I just wanted that little article noted.
I didn't want to make a bookmark because bookmarks are useless.
And I could do that in Google Reader.
Now I can't.
But I can do it in InstaPaper.
So using the Add to InstaPaper button, I can create a separate feed of separate articles
that I tagged all over the internet and it gets turned into one RSS feed.
I can push that RSS feed back to Google Reader, should I want to?
Or I can push it to another feed reading client on my iPad, my iPhone, my Android device, my tablet, whatever.
If it reads RSS, it can read that feed from InstaPaper.
But InstaPaper also has a way in.
Stuff like Flipboard allows you to mark certain articles as Add to InstaPaper to read later.
Stumble upon same thing.
And other applications like, for example, Twitter or Hootsuite or Seasmek allow you to
take certain tweets or links and push them to InstaPaper.
Very, very interesting.
So you can put things in InstaPaper and get an RSS feed out of InstaPaper.
And that RSS feed is going to be something that we're going to focus on in the next chapter.
We're going to do some special things with that RSS feed, helping you to consume the information that you want
on the device that you want in a way that you want.
And you don't always have to read it.
On the edge of real and cyberspace, there's one place you can go.
The light comes.
The first app that you can use to do something really funky with that InstaPaper feed is Twitter feed.
Twitter feeds a free service online that actually takes RSS feeds and does things with it for you.
What I've done is I've taken the nightwise RSS feed, the media feed and linked it in Twitter feed.
Then I told Twitter feed, look, if there's a new article in the media feed, I want you to post that to my LinkedIn account, to Twitter and to Facebook.
So every time I update the RSS feed on the site with a new podcast, boom, automatically, all my social networks get notified.
There's no API yet for Google Plus, but I hope that that's coming pretty soon.
What Twitter feed also does for me is do the main RSS feed of the website.
So every time I make a new article, it automatically notifies all of my social circles.
But what you can also do is put that InstaPaper RSS feed in Twitter feed.
So every time you mark an item for read later, you can not only have that RSS feed of all of those articles pushed to a client.
You can also have it pushed to Twitter feed, which in turn will do stuff for you.
It will push it to social networks if you want to.
Now be careful not to spam your followers out of oblivion, but to kind of stream those information streams, it's pretty darn handy.
But I wanted to take it one step further.
I've added several things to InstaPaper and I really like it.
I go like, oh, I got to read this. Oh, I got to read that.
I get to check that this and check out that.
And you know, when I was out and about, I would just open up InstaPaper on my Android device,
sing down the new articles and you know, read them on my phone or read them on my iPad.
I would always have something to read.
You could even put the InstaPaper RSS feed back into Flipboard, which is brilliant.
Then you have your own Flipboard magazine that Flipboard is kind of a magazine like reader on the iPad.
You have your own Flipboard magazine of articles that you have tagged to read later, which is really convenient.
I mean, it's kind of a stream-punking kind of thing and I like it.
But I still have to read.
Now, it's okay. I mean, we're all addicted to information.
And when we open up our computers or tablets, you know, because we want to have some new information,
we start surfing around aimlessly.
And having this pre-curated feed pushed towards your mobile device or your computer is great.
I mean, I've got filtered information filtered by me that says, hey, night-wise,
this is the stuff that you said that you wanted to read through.
So that's pretty cool. That's okay.
One of the things that you can do, it's nice and dirty-hack, by the way, is add things to InstaPaper,
put the RSS feed of InstaPaper into an RSS reader or a client and share them out to your social media feeds from there.
So you kind of call stuff down and only share what's really interesting.
So that's good. That's nice.
But I don't always have time to read.
As you know, I'm in the car a lot and sometimes I say it would be really nice if that article would get read out loud to me
because there are so many articles that I want to read, then I'm in the car, then I'm kind of out of podcasts
or don't have a podcast that I want to listen to right now.
And I wish I could read through the InstaPaper stuff.
Wouldn't it be great to have that InstaPaper stuff read out loud?
And that is exactly what I started working on.
I found this great application, and let me get the name straight, and it's called ReadMater for InstaPaper.
It is an OSX application that you install on your Mac, and what it does is it takes your InstaPaper feed, reads it out using the voice from the Mac,
and pushes it to iTunes as an RSS feed of a podcast.
Now, it's a Mac only stuff, and it does cost.
I mean, ReadMater costs about $4 if I'm not mistaken.
And in order to be able to do this, you need a subscription to InstaPaper, which is $3 every three months,
which is actually not a lot of money and totally worth it.
Because, you know, InstaPaper, I use a lot, and I think I'll throw those guys some money.
So, what I did is I took a paid account with InstaPaper, $3 every three months, and I downloaded ReadMater.
Now, I did this on my OSX virtual machine server that we talked about a couple of podcasts ago.
So, it is kind of central in my house.
Now, what happens is, when I am on any mobile device, or on my computer, or anywhere where I have access to a browser,
I can actually tag items to add to InstaPaper, which is great.
I mean, there's an Add to InstaPaper option in Safari on iOS devices.
And you can even have that bookmarklet installed on your Android browser.
So, if you hit a interesting website, you just add it to InstaPaper.
Many entrances to InstaPaper.
What happens then is that ReadMater picks this up and reads out the article
using one of the voices on OSX, one of the Mac voices, and it puts it into a podcast feed in iTunes.
I have subscribed, I have linked my iOS devices to iTunes to sync wirelessly.
And what happens is they automatically get the update of the spoken article, which is great.
Even if I synchronize manually, or if it's hooked up through a power outlet, I get the spoken article of the article that I just tagged for InstaPaper after five minutes.
And I can just listen to it in the car.
It's not really perfect because sometimes there's some craft around it, but you get the gist of the article.
You can listen to it and it's really, really convenient.
Now, it's cool.
And I'll show you an example, or I'll let you let you in on an example a little bit later on.
I'll put an article that I wrote, and I added to InstaPaper, and that ReadMater added converted to a podcast.
I'll put that at the end of this podcast, so you can listen to what it sounds like.
It's not perfect, but it's good enough.
But I know what you're saying.
That's really cool, but it takes an iOS scenario all the way.
And I don't have an iOS device, and I have a PC.
What do I do?
Well, to make it really cross-platform, we're going to geek it up one step further, and I'm going to show you how to make it cross-platform compatible as well.
You can do this stuff on Linux, too.
And I bet that there's a Windows app out there, too, that kind of takes the text of an RSS article and reads it out loud.
There are several good voice-over apps on Linux that I know.
I don't really know them on Windows, but you can do this without ReadMater.
You can just do this with an Instapaper account, and that paid account, I think, is what you're going to need and have that RSS feed push towards you.
No problem.
But if you don't have a Mac, you can just build a virtual machine of OSX in virtual box.
I told you how to do that a couple of episodes ago.
We did a dokecast about that.
So just go back to the website, and you can build your own OSX.
A machine, your own Lion Machine.
That's not really a problem.
Even if you have a PC and only Linux or a Windows box, you can virtualize that.
ReadMater, you can download from the store.
That's not a problem.
And you can, of course, iTunes comes with OSX.
But iTunes only sings with iOS devices night-wise.
That's what we want night-wise.
You've got to help sound-night-wise.
Yes, I will.
You see these files get stored in a certain folder.
And I'm going to quickly access the machine where I've stored it on.
So to basically show you how to do that, let me just log in here.
Oh, sorry.
It's very professional.
I should have logged in a little bit later.
Let's just do this live.
It's kind of a long password, but it works fine.
Now, let me see where I am here.
Now, this podcast, ReadMater, pushes the podcast to iTunes.
And iTunes just stores it on your drive somewhere.
So the exact location where it does is in your home folder.
Under the directory, if I'm not mistaken, under the directory,
under the directory ReadLater, ReadMater, in the iTunes directory.
So you go to your home folder, iTunes, iTunes Music, podcasts.
And there you'll find the ReadLater folder, which holds all of the ReadLater sound files
that ReadMater made for you.
They are in AIFF format.
So you need a player that can play this.
But once you have this pad, you can access it because they're just files in a folder.
If you don't sync iTunes to your iOS device, it doesn't really matter.
You just need to access that folder.
So what you need to do is go to your Preferences pane on your Mac.
And in the System Preferences, sharing, enable Remote Login.
This remote, this will enable you to access that folder via SSH.
So if you can set up an SSH connection to your Mac, you're great.
I mean, that's all you need to do.
You take an SSH client and you log into your Mac and you go to the IP address.
You know, slash users, slash your name, slash music, slash iTunes, slash podcasts,
and where the directory is.
It's a pretty long-winded directory.
But if you have a client like FileZilla, you can just browse through the file structure.
So if you have a PC or Linux machine, use FileZilla to access your iTunes folder
and the files that ReadMater makes using something like FileZilla.
If you have an Android device, you can use the application.
And it's a free application, by the way.
I kind of lost my shoutouts here, sorry, ever lost my shoutouts.
You can use the application called BotSync.
It's free. BotSync actually allows you to sync down a folder
on a remote SSH machine to your Android phone.
So you just enter the IP address of your Mac, the right path,
and the directory where it needs to start on your SSD card,
and press Sync.
It will sync the directory to your Android phone.
If you use Goodreader on iOS, you can do the same thing.
Just, you know, hook up to that folder over SSH and sync it down completely.
That way, even if you don't have an iOS device or you don't want to use the iTunes Sync,
you can get all of those spoken podcasts into your mobile device whenever you want it.
Listening to the articles that you wanted to read later when you want to,
where you want to, and how you want to.
Well, that's all we have time for this week on the nightcast.
A pretty technical show with a very cool tip using the services.
Read a meter, Google reader, and Instapaper.
Bot Sync, Goodreader, and FileZilla are the tools that you need to make this solution work anywhere on any computer.
So even if you are on a PC or Linux box, you can even virtualize that line machine,
and still have all of the goodness that comes with using a readamator, Instapaper, iTunes,
and whatever podcasting client that you want to use.
So I hope you found it interesting. We're going to round up with an actual result of how it sounds,
because I would hate for you to go to all of this trouble having it installed and then saying,
I don't like how it sounds.
So we're going to give you an article that I wrote read out by Instapaper.
Now it's non-sweet and sexy, it's my voice, but you know, I can't podcast every article that I do.
So kind of think of it like a story time episode read by my Mac.
See you guys next week on another episode of KWTV.
We'll probably be diving into alternatives to Ubuntu Linux, so stay tuned for that one.
We've done a lot of hardware reviews last couple of weeks, so I thought it was time for another geeky episode there.
And until then, I hope you have a great week.
You know where to find us, Nightwise at Nightwise.com.
Sorry, feedback at Nightwise.com is the email address, Nightwise.com, K9GHTWISE.com,
is of course the website where you need to go to to subscribe to the feed using Instapaper or whatever podcasting client that you're using.
And you can of course find us on Twitter, Twitter.com slash Nightwise or use the hashtag,
hashtag Dear Nightwise to ask us a question.
We have got that RSS feed of that hashtag pushed into Instapaper, so we can read your tweets whenever we want to.
Plenty of stuff to do with stuff like readamatic or readamator and Instapaper.
If you're a little bit creative, so I hope I've given you a little incentive to do that.
See you guys on and girls on the flip side in the next episode of KWTV or the Nightcast.
Until then, let technology work for you instead the other way around and see ya.
Curating the library of our minds. Technology Wednesday, the 21st of December 2011, 1357.
4354 articles in red.
The number stands out in bold red letters on my otherwise pristine and stark background of my iPad.
It is the number of items in red in my RSS feed.
It's just a number though, just one number of the many messages, news items, tweets, videos podcasts and comments that await my attention.
And still, this fairly hefty number does signify a select stream of information I have personally chosen.
My own slice of what I find interesting online, whom I have piped into my RSS reader.
I tried to do a mental calculation on how long it would take me to effectively read all of those articles with an average of about 5 or 10 minutes per article.
The revelation that only scanning through the headers would take me the better part of the afternoon, is sobering and depressing at the same time.
How on earth am I gonna keep up?
In a new normal of the information age, where filtering has become much more important than collecting, it seems that even if we slice down our piece of the internet, we are unable to even glance at all the information that is constantly coming our way.
For the umpteenth time, I promise myself I'll spend some time culling down all of those RSS feed even further.
Bringing their number that has significantly shrunk over time down ever further.
But, cutting them down to lesser number would be easy.
The skill required here is to further clarify and purify the information streams recording to my interests and needs for information.
When I was giving lecture a few days ago, I was asked, how come you know all this stuff? And I must say, I was a little surprised by the question.
To be honest, I didn't know. Didn't everybody know this kind of stuff? I had to think back where along the way I picked all of the stuff I talked about up somewhere and came to a strange conclusion. I know everything I know.
From the internet, whether it be books that I downloaded or listened to articles that I read, DVD talks that I watched and podcasts I listened to. And it got me thinking.
If a lot of the operational knowledge I have is somehow directly or indirectly from the internet, it becomes pretty important how I filter down those sources of information.
When you start looking at it from that perspective, we, the index generation, are responsible for the quality of information we select and consume.They do form a lot of the direct input in the stuff we know.
Where the internet and all things digital had, for a long time, retained the characteristic of being, leisurely, they are now becoming more important sources of information than, for example, schools or classes.
Perhaps the word important is not well chosen, but they certainly are becoming more and more abundant. And since we humans are shaped by our surroundings and information in them.
We need to think carefully when we hear it that very environment.
Watching cat videos for hours on end, spending evenings on farmville or reading through flimsy gossip websites.
Or even munching the mindless yet hilariously funny links on Reddit.
It is all part of our informational environment and it stands in stark contrast to all of the other information that is out there.
Dead talks, Wikipedia articles, inspiring YouTube videos.
You can go on and on.
So the world has changed. The internet has lost its prime shine as a source for porn, chatting and leisurely activity.
It is becoming the cloud-sourced part of our intellectual personality, and we, instead of becoming careless consumers of binary information, now have a responsibility.
The responsibility to cure those information streams for the museum of our mind.
I take a look at the 4000 plus unread items and wonder how much useless junk I would stuff into my head on reading them, how much time I would spend doing so and on how much information that is much more valuable.
I would be missing out. Yesterday I served the web for fun.
Today I am curating the library of my mind. And a particle.
Thanks for coming to the edge of real and cyberspace. You have been listening to the nightcast.
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Please remember there is a real world beyond cyberspace, but it is not all that important.
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