The Reader and the Tagger

In recent months, my web browsing has undergone two dramatic changes. The first came when I started my account at del.icio.us, and began to contemplate the potential of tagging and social bookmarking. Tagging revolutionized my ability to store massive amounts of web pages that I found interesting, and still find them again later on with relative ease.

When I added the Firefox extension, I parted with the traditional bookmarking system permanently.

Now, I have little doubt that this move allowed me to keep a vastly larger amount of bookmarks than I otherwise would have. I even attempted to facilitate my daily browsing cycle by tagging those pages I visited frequently with the word "routine", so they would all be easy to locate together.

However, while in the past there were always only a handful of pages that I would visit regularly, the rest of my bookmarks were there in front of me if ever I wanted to browse through them. The problem with del.icio.us from this perspective is that you have to actively bring pages up by searching for particular tags. Not that I had any problem finding something when I was trying to locate it--just that before I had a list in front of me that was easy to choose from, whereas now I would have to think about what it was I wanted to look over before it appeared.

Thus after resisting it for some time, I finally decided to look into a feed reader. I decided on Google Reader.

What a difference! I put all my routine reads in one folder, and the rest in a big "Miscellaneous" folder that I can choose to look through or ignore depending on how I feel. Unlike the system I devised with del.icio.us, I've got everything right in front of me, much like my old bookmarks. However, above and beyond my old bookmarks, my Reader page tells me which websites have updated--and in many cases, I don't even have to go to the website itself to read the update, I can read it right there from its feed. I can also choose to mark an entire folder at once as "read" if I don't feel like going through it.

I am absorbing so much more information than I ever have before. This should be evident to anyone who even briefly glimpses Sophistpundit in passing these days; the number of posts in a day or in a week, small and large (but particularly small), has exploded. Normally I go through alternating periods of inactivity and rapid blogging, but this is a bit different. I've simply found a way to get a lot more out of my web browsing. Put differently, the productivity of my reading time has just been augmented tremendously.

Google Reader and del.icio.us have complemented one another well; the former provides me with new information up to the minute, while the latter ensures that nothing potentially useful is lost in the long run.

How the Andrew Keens of the world can earnestly believe that the web will bring about a rise in ignorance is beyond me. In the brief time that I've been using Google Reader, I've read a formal paper on copyright law, learned about the Alms for Jihad lawsuit and the controversial Golden Chain, seen a dispute discussed by multiple perspectives, and heard about a recent bomb scare before it received any play in the major news outlets--just to name a few examples of what I've gained.

Moreover, Google Reader has encouraged me to read points of view that I disagree with much more actively than before. Oh, I disagree with just about everyone on some point or other, but when it came to my old bookmarks or my del.icio.us browsing system, I rarely ever made it out to blogs like DailyKos or Eschaton. Now I find it much easier to at the very least browse the top couple of posts, and you know what? I am much more intellectually enriched for it.

The marginal cost for viewing each additional source has plummetted, and I fail to see how that can be anything other than a good thing. Then again, I've also formally argued that that's just about the best thing that can happen where information is concerned, so I suppose I might have a bit of a biased perspective.