Reading Content

The web is full of wonderful, amusing, and interesting information and discussion. Sometimes though it can be a bit overwhelming, especially to newcomers who are just starting to get the hang of twitter, blogging and such.

I use two tools to help organize the content I enjoy reading.

The first is Google Reader which I’ve been using for a couple years to keep track of blogs. This online app allows you to subscribe to blogs and easily tell which entries are new or that you haven’t read yet. It can even notify you when more static websites are updated. I‘ve talked a lot about Google Reader in the past.

Over the last few months I’ve also started to spend more time in Empire Avenue, browsing for content. Though Empire is not as mature as Google Reader and its primary focus is not so much reading content as connecting with new content, it has been useful in a different way than Google Reader in that I can view ALL the content a single person makes in one place.

Basically Empire has a person’s twitter/blogs/flickr/facebook all linked into one profile. So I can go to a single location and read all of a person’s tweets and blog entries, or browse through the photos they have uploaded.

But what about the noise?

Because Empire Avenue also has an investment system using fake money (eaves) to purchase shares in people there can be a bit of ‘game’ noise if all you care about is the content (and additionally once you follow or invest in a few hundred people you get ALL their feeds coming into your headlines page which can be a bit noisy too). Here are some tips that I use to help focus on just-the-content. Over time I hope to see more improvements to this aspect of Empire Avenue too.

So the basic trick I do (and it is far from perfect but it seems to be working a bit better than just using the headlines page) is this:

I go to my Portfolio page (which lists all the people I have bought shares in.) I then sort so that I’m seeing at the top the people I have the most money invested in (presumably these are the people I’m most interested in, in regards to content).

Now I look at each and then right-click and open a new tab to go their profile page. Here I can see all their tweets/posts/updates. I can also filter these (i.e., if I only want to look at blog entries I can do that by clicking on the little filter buttons above the content).

I then rinse and repeat through the portfolio until I start getting into the influencers I am not not as interested in. I try and do this a couple times a week.

Any other suggestions from the Empire Avenue people out there?