Friday rant: news
If you feel that you do not have time to finish reading this post, then you are probably in its target population 
No, seriously, this is all about wanting/needing to consume news online, and not having enough time to do it. Well, mostly it is about how I used to do it, and how and why am I getting my news these days.
I “went online” back in 1993, and I have been on the Web since 1995. The first timeI got information about a significant event on the Web before seeing about it on TV was one year later. Slowly, but surely, I realized the power of having many different (and preferably contradicting) sources about some event as possible. By the beginning of this century I completely gave up on newspaper and TV. I remember a period between 2002 and 2005 when I was mostly following various news portals. With the advent of blogs, I mostly abandoned theose and started reading as many blogs as I could about certain constellation of topics, and in as many languages as I could.
Of course, the “as many as I could” was getting smaller every year. I was running out of time (science is demanding). Then I started using RSS readers (news aggregators). As news reading strategies go, RSS has an advantage over surfing in that one does not have to go to all the websites periodaclly. The only thing that needs to be done is find all the RSS feeds of favorite sites, and subscribe to them in the reader. It will check periodically whether there is a new entry in the feed, and if there is, you will be notified and able to read it.
So far, so good. RSS is a standard, and there are many ways it can be used. At first I was using various Firefox plugins for reading. But I was never really happy, since I had to be online to read anything. At some point (probably late), I realized that the then new version of Thunderbird supported RSS news reading. Finally, I could get all my news (or at least their excerpts, depending on what goes into the RSS feed) offline, for reading when and where I can (remember, not so much time for reading non-science related stuff). The best thing: no distractions. I mean, I was getting only the text of the article, with an odd image, but no ads, no animated things around the text, no links to other posts, nothing! Finally, I had found what I wanted!
Or so it would have been, had I not started to use more than one computer (first at work, than I got an iPod touch). Well, I could always use Thunderbird at work and some RSS reader for iPhone/iPod Touch (I was using a free RSS Runner App, really good stuff). Well, the obvious problem appeared: synchronization. And so I had to give up a part of my privacy and fly into the cloud. In other words, I started using Google Reader (note: there are other services which have the same functionality, such as Netvibes which I also tried). Now, since RSS reader was online, I could access it from any machine and read news in a synchronized way. Since the internet access is getting ubiqutous these days, I figured I do not need an onfline storage (though Google Gears can be used with Google Reader). On my iPod Touch I started using Doppler. It synchronizes with Google Reader and has the basic functionality (i.e. starring news, built-in browser). However, I found it somewhat inadequate because I could not synchronize posts I already starred (favorited) before. So I switched to (slightly more expensive) RSS Flash g, which has all the functionality. Also, it has a limited offline storage.
So what is my current news gathering strategy? Recently I divide my news sources in lossy and lossless. Lossy are those sources for which I do not care if I miss some updates (usually news sites, portals). Lossless are those from which I want to get every update. I visit occasionally the lossy sites, and subscribe to the rest in Google Reader. Now I have managed to bring the daily number of updates to a manageable magnitude (i.e., less than 30).And that’s how it has to stay, as the free time to read news is approaching zero. 
P.S. For synchronizing non-RSS news I use the Read It Later service. Powerfull thing! I think one might get similar functionality with Firefox + Zotero, using library synchronization, but I am not up to date with Zotero.
