As an aside to today’s piece, The Masters of Data: There are those who, presented with the veritable flood of information produced by the modern internet, would meekly suggest that the answer is to close one’s laptop, turn off the smartphone and get outside. Pfft. Those people are just quitters. No, if you are one of the many wayward souls experiencing the difficulty of trying to stay well-informed in a post-postmodern world of social media, 24 hour news and access to the entire world’s press from your browser, fear not: there’s an app for your existential troubles. Possibly the most important thing you can do is abandon reading individual websites separately and embrace an RSS reader, which will pull in articles from websites you subscribe to and let you read them all in one place. While Google Reader is the most common and obvious option for RSS, it has a small downside: it’s unforgivably ugly. A much better option is Feedly, which not only links to your Reader account and presents all those posts in a far prettier format, it makes sharing them and finding new ones far easier too. Still, add in 50 sites to your RSS reader and follow a couple of hundred people on Facebook and Twitter and looming behind all this is what is probably our biggest problem: if we only have so much time stay abreast of the world of news and culture, how do you know what’s good to read? How do you separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff? That’s where a new type of app that recommends articles to you based on what friends you trust are reading. One such app is Percolate, which was created by Noah Brier (who is featured in our Masters of Data story). Though currently still in testing, Percolate combs through your Google Reader and Twitter feeds to and then emails you a short list comprised only of the things most of your most trusted friends are recommending. Two other choices are Summify, which adds Facebook links to the mix, and Stellar.io, started by famous blogger Jason Kottke, which only shows you links your friends have ‘favourited’. Still, even with filtering services like Percolate, the web can be a less than ideal reading experience. But if you have an iPad, apps like the new (and Canadian) Zite not only pull in articles recommended by friends, but also create an aesthetically pleasing, personalized iPad magazine based on those links. Though they have unfortunately been hit with some legal troubles for this very functionality, the app is great. Luckily, if Zite does continue to be plagued by litigious content companies, the very pretty Flipboard app is even better looking, if not quite as good at recommending new stuff. Of course there are yet more apps. The indispensible Instapaper lets you save longer articles to read later on the web, a smartphone or a tablet. Pulse breaks down things into a lovely grid format. Pinboard is a sophisticated social bookmarking tool for all the things you want to save, while Reeder is… hmm, now this advice is getting too much isn’t it? Maybe those people telling you to get outside were right. Well, if it really is too overwhelming, your last resort is always Freedom. A small program for Mac or Windows, it delivers what is perhaps the only sure-fire solution to information overload: with a couple of clicks, it locks you out from the internet for up to eight hours at a time.
