How I consume news now - and why newspapers are definitely dead.

I'm probably much later to this than most tech geeks - but I had an epiphany yesterday based on some research and a confluence of technologies that all came together for me.  For about the last six months or so, I have been consuming most of my news and information via RSS feeds.  RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a network protocol that allows you to subscribe to a website. (that orange icon on the right) Anytime a website that supports RSS changes, or receives new information  it is then sent to you. Rather then have to check six or seven of my favorite websites for whats going on each day the information comes to me sort of like a daily paper, landing on my virtual driveway.

I was able to 'produce my own newspaper', it contained the sections I wanted to see by the producers and authors I liked, and left out the junk I did not care about. I could subscribe to my favorite tech blog, Mashable, read up on geek gadgets at Engadget, stay in touch with whats going on at my favorite company at Cult of Mac and get a little social commentary at Dvorak. Real news comes in the form of amazing photo journalism at The Big Picture and don't forget a dose of off-color celebrity gossip from The Superficial. This was a huge benefit, but also produced a problem.

What problem you ask? Well, I don't consume all of my media in the same place. I may be on my work laptop, or in my home office, or on my iPad on the couch. I was getting three 'newspapers', one in each location. What I really needed was a way to synchronize the feeds so that they knew - yes, I've read that already or no I haven't read that yet.

Enter Google reader - a way to subscribe to multiple feeds and consume them on multiple devices and formats, while keeping track of what I have seen before and what is new. On my Mac's I use NetNewsWire, on my iPad, Mobile RSS HD and they all sync with Google. If I happen to be on my work laptop, and stuck in the Windows world, Outlook makes a great portal into the info. - Articles appear in a separate inbox just like new emails and if I have already read them someplace else, they are there but don't appear as new. You have to modify your preferences a bit. In the all mail items column on the left, right click the RSS feeds icon and choose properties. in the window that opens, go to the home page tab and check the show homepage by default button then make the address http://google.com/reader

Walla! - your entire newspaper, magazine and blog post collections, neatly packaged into a single pipe and consumable across multiple platforms and on multiple devices. If you read something cool (like this post) you can share it on Facebook, or Twitter with just one click.

Add my blog to your virtual newspaper stream with this link.