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 Politech mailinglist.
From http://www.politechbot.com/info/about.html:
Acts@core.mailboks.com Acrux@core.mailboks.com Adam@core.mailboks.com Adar@core.mailboks.com Ada@core.mailboks.com
slashdot.org
newsforge.com
theregister.co.uk
my university's daily newspaper (no link!)
fark.com
the smirking chimp
dr. fun
the daily vault (although i review there once in a while)
google news
daily rotten
lwn.net
crackmonkey archives
the dot
kde-look.org
corona's coming attractions
snopes' update page
doc's weblog
And I think that's about it for a daily basis.
My daily trip usualy begins with comics strip:
c om,
:)
User Friendly
Mega Tokyo
Sinfest
Then, I usualy go to Slashdot. Then its off to the
linux game tome (happypenguin.org),
then linuxgames.com. After that comes
gbacentral.net,
doomworld,
desktoplinux.
firingsquad.com,
tomshardware.
Oh, and TheHaus.net and icculus.org.
Whem I'm bored I sometime check ve3d.com and
http://www.redlynx.com/phobiaIII/index.html (to see if the long delayed Phobia 3 version is finaly out).
About once a week I check linuxhardware.org, but its not updated often.
Also, I frequently browse sourceforge.net, contributing to escape of the unicorn (www.sourceforge.net/projects/eounicorn) which is in early beta.
That's about it, now you know everything about my browsing habits and didn't have to install any spywares into my computer.
Have I been fooled?
By the way, let me take this oppurtunity to sing the praises of RSS, an XML schema, that allows for new aggragtors such as NetNewsWire for OSX to collect and read blog, new sites, etc... from one app... Wonderful stuff.... If your websites aren't outputting it, they should be!
"Realworld" News
indymedia.org - far left news and thoughts
newsmax.com - far right news and thoughts
nytimes.com - somewhere inbetween, leaning to the left
I do this to balance things out so that hopefully the info I am being fed (and don't lie to yourself, you ARE being fed) is at least a bit varied, and I can try to make own my own conclusions...
What is popular and currently interesting: (Popular doesn't mean best, but i AM interested in what's popular)o rg
daypop.org/top
memepool.com
slashdot.
Tecnical Reference
phpbuilder.com - php and mysql reference
http://forums.macnn.com/ - all things Mac
devshed.com - more php and mysql
www.macdevcenter.com - more Mac
macosxhints.com - OSX centric
arstechnica.com - everything else!
Breaking Mac News:
maccentral.com
macnn.com
thinksecret.com (for somewhat reliable rumors)
General Interest
howstuffworks.com - one of THE most underated sites online
Fun
I have a girlfriend for fun.
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
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.)
I've had to cut down on blogging lately, lest I get fired. But my daily routine is:
n dex2&cid=9 65 - Yahoo! News Most Popular
news.google.com (Used to be news.yahoo.com - I like Google better).
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=i
Slashdot.org (Where I come to flame, troll, be trolled, etc)
Kuro5hin.org (For thoughtful debate)
Salon.com (+5, Insightful)
Plastic.com (+5, Funny)
portland.indymedia.org (Check on the local anarchists/communists/Earth! Firsters)
www.indymedia.org (Check on the global anarchists/communists/Earth! Firsters)
- James
- Slashdot... Hardly a surprise here..
- Freshnews.. I really like this news aggregator site, from there, I usually scan OReilly, Kuro5hin, Ars and a few other sites they feature for interesting articles and visit if the title seems interesting..
- Use Perl.. Top 10 journals, mostly
- Google news.. This replaced visits to BBC, CNN and a few others
- Freshmeat.. and a few other shareware sites from time to time
- Joel on Software.. and a few more blogs, like Scripting
- Trillian, Phoenix, Apache and a few more software sites for possible updates...
- Webmail accounts
Yeah, that's about it.. Fortunately for my productivity, I cant find a good public news server, or I'd also be on Usenet for a large portion of the dayWhat this means is you can bookmark a group of URLs, and then download them in parallel. That's much faster, because you don't have to wait for each to download individually, since even with broadband, it takes a while for each page to download. Also, you don't have to think about it; you can download the same URLs every day.
Try it; it's very cool; atleast it is if you like using tabbed browsing.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Whenever a new site I want/need to check regularly I add it to this list. It's like my morning newspaper, without the paper.
In my _Daily folder I currently have:
(Fun)
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3
http://www.snopes.com/info/whatsnew.htm
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail.html
http://www.userfriendly.org/
(Friends and blogs)
http://www.kuro5hin.org/user/sunbeam60/diary
http://www.rasmus.sigsgaard.com/blog.php
http://www.kuro5hin.org/
http://meidell.dk/blog
(News) http://slashdot.org/
http://wired.com/
http://www.computerworld.dk/
http://politiken.dk/VisArtikel.iasp?PageID=1
http://www.memepool.com/
http://osnews.com/
http://www.shacknews.com/
http://www.gonegold.com/
Many of these are dispersed with a quick scan, and nothing more. Others are checked thoroughly and spawn many new tabs (like /.)
Give me liberty or give me kill -s 9
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?