Alerts, Feeds and a Foray into Sustainable Agriculture

I recently decided that I was going to get serious about my daily literature review.  For a long time I was in the habit of reading the entire contents of the nytimes.com front page and slashdot.org’s featured stories.  I did this habitually and via a browser, often during 5-minute brain naps at work and often when I ate dinner at my hotel.  These sites will continue to be two of my anchor sources, but I decided that I needed to significantly increase the size of my net. 

My first stop was Google Alerts.  Google Alerts is not a particularly new tool, but it hasn’t achieved very wide penetration.  This seems odd to me; so many people dislike the news media and the concept of an editorial board choosing the content that they read, but give them a tool to find their own news every day scoured from around the world and they don’t use it.  For me, I had just never stopped to consider it before; I suspect this is the same for many others as well.

My second stop was NetNewsWire, a free feed reader client for OS X.  I have considered feed readers in the past but never liked the ones I came across.  My typical experience had been that I kept up well for a week or so, but then the inbox-style interface would inevitably get overcome as I got behind in my reading.  NNW’s interface is far superior to any reader that I’ve used in the past and pretty effectively counters that problem, while adding on other features that I now can’t live without.  It’s extremely easy to navigate via keyboard, it loads full articles in the background (very useful when I’m using a hotel’s WiFi), and it only keeps recent articles so that I don’t get overwhelmed by seeing thousands of newsbits pile up requesting my attention.  I can now absorb probably 3-5 times as much information in the same amount of time as when I was reading in a browser, largely because the process facilitates skimming and selective reading far more efficiently.

The combination of these two brought me to Jack Gurley and Calvert’s Gift Farm.   It’s an organic vegetable farm about five miles from where I grew up and where my parents still live.  I immediately contacted Jack after finding him on http://www.sare.org/ and just today met his wife Beckie at the Tacoma Park Farmers’ Market (which, by the way, is probably the best farmer’s market that I’ve been to).  I’ll be volunteering with them for the next month and hope to learn quite a lot.  I start tomorrow.

So far, I’m diggin’ the new routine.