Slashdot Mirror
Your Take On(line) Reality?
Omega1045 asks: "It is a fact that our perception is based on the information given to us. I find tha Slashdot readers offer a wealth of knowledge though the various sites they reference. I ask Slashdot, where do you surf to on a daily basis? What is your daily pattern of information retrieval? This is of particular interest to me as the Internet has made us all publishers. There are many sources of information, all with their own slant on the day's news, many non-traditional. Where do my fellow peers go on a daily basis?"
The links are just abbreviations, so you have to explore to discover what they mean, but the advantage to this is that I can cite the abbreviation easily each time I link a story found via that source.
The idea of putting them in rows at the top is so that frequent visitors to my blog can jump to other sources if they don't find anything new/interesting at mine. (I call them 'jumpbars'.) Lately I've started adding little asterisks for sources that have recently done especially noteworthy updates.
My local startpage duplicates the jumpbars, and adds less-frequent sources like monthlies. When I started blogging I made a serious effort to learn the update schedules of every online periodical, and I created a generic startpage that summarised these. (It's badly out of date now.) The idea was to encourage people to copy this page and customise it to their interests. But knowing when zines usually update makes it easy to prioritize my surfing-schedule. (I wish all periodicals spelled this info out on their front page, eg The Onion comes out late Tuesday.)
I think NewsHub still isn't appreciated for its headline-aggregation pages. I'd use NewsLinx too except that most all the tech zines have decided to use obnoxiously junky html-design, so I stick with Slashdot and the Register for tech news.
My politics are lefty, and Sam Smith's Progressive Review gives a very deep daily summary with links, while Common Dreams reprints full articles from many major sources. A newcomer is Memory Hole that specializes in stories the mainstream media tries to suppress/ignore.
For space news, NasaWatch is tops. I've mostly given up on Drudge and Salon, and am having doubts about the BBC science page.
Other daily faves include the AstroPic of the Day, two poem-of-the-day sites, Zippy the Pinhead, and various blogs. A weekly that I think is underappreciated is Dean Baker's Economic Reporting Review that gives a very dry weekly critique of economics-propaganda in the NY Times and Washington Post. (They very systematically distort the facts with the obvious goal of redistributing the wealth upwards.)
The stats and status page for an intranet service I'm involved in running.
www.dilbert.com - 'nuff said
keepersoflists.org - a bit hit and miss, but occasionally +5 coffee-through-nose funny
www.theregister.co.uk - essential
slashdot - 'nuff said
www.telegraph.co.uk - Yes, it's antidiluvian right-wing stuff, but the Alex cartoon strip in the business section is a deadly accurate parody of the financial services biz (currently exploring the world of unemployed investment bankers after Alex has been laid off by MegaBank....)
www.ananova.com/news - headline scan in case they've picked up something the BBC has missed.
Google news - For a more US-centric take on the world
catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/ - The Risks list digest - when my automatic checker flags an update
www.economist.com - The Economist newspaper, on Fridays - I get the print edition too but the web site has additional stories.
Various news and info pages on employer's intranet.
Reuters news service via employer's intranet, especially for air transport information
3 airline booking sites every few weeks to track any useful special offers
Total time taken: maybe 15 minutes if there's a lot going on.
Yes, I'm an expat Brit IT-er working in financial services. How could you tell?