voila (Taken with instagram)
der aprikosenbaum im garten macht freude, die früchte sowieso! (Taken with instagram)
how i use instapaper
i love instapaper. discovering interesting content on the web is pretty easy nowadays, just follow the right people on twitter. but then you also need to read all that stuff and this requires some kind of workflow.
this is where instapaper comes in: post a link to the “read later” queue via your favorite twitter client, email, or a browser button. next time you open up the instapaper iphone or ipad app, the content is right there in an easily readable form (no ads, pop ups, widgets or other distractions). when you are done reading, press the archive button and that’s it - you have just resolved one more task, isn’t this nice?
in addition to the read later queue and the archive there is also the possibility to store articles in personally defined folders. so you can categories what you have been reading. last year i started using this feature quite heavily. i am not sure though whether it’s worth the effort, because it is actually very rare that i go back to my instapaper archive to find already read articles. plus: using folders is really not the main focus of instapaper and the whole iphone/iphad UI is not so comfortable for working with them (e.g. you cannot put several articles into the same folder at once).
anyway, i did read, archive and categories a lot of articles using instapaper last year. and i spent alot of time doing this. how much? as a pretty rough guess i’d say it was half an hour per day on average. that’s more than 22 8-hour-work-days, i.e. more than one work month in 2010.
talking about numbers and statistics, this is actually another great thing about instapaper: at the end of the year you know how much you have been reading, and what you have been reading about - thanks to the folders (maybe i should keep up with them). but it comes even better: you also know who wrote the things you have been reading and even who recommended the article to you in the first place. the latter information is being stored in instapaper if you post a link via the iphone/ipad twitter client.
why is this so great? i spent alot of time discovering and reading articles on the web in 2010 and all together it was worth it. but it’s still time, and time is finite, so i need to optimize on how i spend it. knowing who are the publishers and recommenders that i most read from is valuable information in doing this, even more so if i can break this down by topic i read about.
figuring out these numbers is what i did a week ago. to achieve this i analized my instapaper archive using another really cool piece of software, google refine. more about this comes in a later post.
photo by ario_, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license
colored creatures invading our house and eating our food (Taken with instagram)
