From Tyler Cowan “Is surfing the internet dead?

Ten to fifteen years ago, I remember the joys of just finding things, clicking links through to other links, and in general meandering through a thick, messy, exhilarating garden.

Yup he acknowledges that much of the content is either behind a paywall, or in silos that suck like Facebook. People seem to be doing less significant writing on their blogs, though I’m trying.

He contends that you should be finding most things via Twitter, which is another fairly big bag of suck for most. Now Cowan says that’s my fault because I follow sucky people instead of interesting ones.

Here is how I find much of my good content.

RSS is alive and well. I use Unread now and it’s amazing despite the stupid feature that it doesn’t have so you can’t actually add a new feed from it. I have Reeder installed just to add feeds.

Second great resource is other curators. I subscribe to a bunch of newsletters. Here they are:

Third, follow curators like Cowan or other blogs for people that have something useful to say. A short part of my list

Many of these feeds point me to other content that matters. I don’t read everything they write, but I read lots of it and follow links to other authors and then subscribe there. Most of the people I follow I found because of a list like the one you just went through.

Finally, look at the google search alerts. I have a few keywords I want to get some alerts on in my email inbox and then I read some of the articles that google search provides me.

I pull these together into my Friday Newsletter to help you be as intentional about your home life as you are about your work life.

Yes surfing is dead, but there are lots of other ways to get content worth your time online. I