Rockets & Rayguns

Every once in a while someone will ask me, “How did you find that?” and I start trying to explain what you see below. I didn’t assemble this system with any sort of plan. It’s just grown organically over several years of internet use. I don’t worry anymore about “missing out” on something because if it’s going to be of interest to me, it’s almost certainly going to find it’s way to my eyes through one of these channels. Long live The Filter Bubble!

Twitter

I have three Twitter accounts. One account is locked and limited to people I know in real life (no co-workers, though). Another account is unlocked and used primarily to follow and socialize with music people (labels, artists, bloggers, writers, other fans). This is my primary account and how I get a lot of music news and links. I will very often send article links from this account to Instapaper for later reading. The third account is used mainly for following non-music people, bars and restaurants, semi-famous people, and anyone else that I rarely interact with, but still want to follow without having them clogging my main account feed.

Facebook

I use Facebook almost exclusively to keep up with family, and local friends who are organizing events. I have a total of 81 friends on Facebook. In a very few cases I do follow a band or label here, provided it’s the primary method they use for communications and they don’t just mirror their Twitter account. I am a very light Facebook user and almost never post status updates there.

Tumblr

Here I am following a random assortment of friends, writers, bands, and strangers that post interesting images. Some music news and info inevitably trickles to me here, but it’s mainly about following the people who have very interesting music discussions on Tumblr. Some of those people are professional writers, some are not. And of course my friends often link to things I want to see.

This Is My Jam

This is a bit like Tumblr for music only. As a rule, for starters, I am only following people here that I already know from other social networks (mainly Twitter). This is a good way to discover music your friends and contacts are currently recommending. The killer feature of TIMJ, though, is its ability to continuously play songs on your dashboard, from the top of your feed to the bottom. So you can open TIMJ, start playing the topmost track, and then go about your business in another browser tab while it streams tracks your contacts have posted.

RSS

I use Google Reader, along with Reeder on my iPhone/iPad/Mac. I almost exclusively use RSS to follow blogs whose posts I want to make sure I see. I have 93 subscriptions at the moment, almost all of which are either music, design, or technology/Mac. In some cases I do follow bands or labels here, if they don’t have a mailing list and their blog is the only way to get timely news updates. I don’t subscribe to any local or global news organization feeds or mega-blogs here. That stuff will clog your RSS feed fast.

iGoogle

This is where I place headline feeds (gadgets) for news. I have one tab containing stuff like MacRumors, The Verge, and Engadget, another tab with CNN, NYT, and The Guardian, and a third tab with Pitchfork, The Quietus, and Badass Digest. Each gadget is limited to the most recent five headlines. If this stuff were in my RSS feed, it would be overwhelming and most of it is ignorable. But since I have iGoogle open all anyway day it works as way to casually keep up with news headlines. If I see something interesting here, I just send it to Instapaper for later reading.

Flipboard

I blew this off when it first launched on the iPad. At the time I was trying to use Pulp for a similar purpose, but Pulp is much harder to customize and maintain and not nearly as good. Now that Flipboard is on the iPhone I browse it often, as a time-killer. Essentially I am using it to aggregate a personalized culture magazine with sections for technology, music, food, and fashion. Almost all the content I follow here I am not following anywhere else. This is all the stuff that’s not important enough to me to have cluttering up my RSS feed or iGoogle page. Casual reading.

Instapaper

This is the most important app I use. Any long-ish article from any other source above can be queued here for later reading. My entire “system” would probably fall apart with Instapaper. I don’t use the newer social/sharing features of the app much, though.

Pinboard

I’m using this as a cloud-based bookmark archive. I have it configured to automatically scrape up any article I favorite in Instapaper. For some reason I never think to use this for searching or content discovery. It’s just a support utility for me. On my iPhone I use Delitouch to access my Pinboard archive. I can move items RSS items from Reeder directly here, as well.