No, I’m not flashing back to the days of R.I.F. and SchoolHouse Rock. As a follow up of sorts to yesterday’s tips for bloggers, I thought I’d offer some tips for weblog readers. Actually, much, if not all, of what I’m about to say will apply to anybody that does a lot of web surfing.

More Efficient Surfing

The first tool to check out is some kind of newsreader/aggregator. Instead of having to go visit your favorite sites looking for updates, the newsreader does that for you. That makes your browsing much more efficient. You can generally see a summary (some feeds provide full articles) of the new content and then decide if you want to go visit the site to read the whole article. The one caveat is that the sites must have a syndication feed. The majority of weblogs now have such feeds and many mainstream sites (Yahoo News, BBC News, etc.) are providing them as well. MezzoBlue has written a nice article which explains all of this in a bit more detail, but is still very readable for the non-techies. Here’s just a portion of that article:

Syndication is the process of using RSS/Atom for automated updates, another way of getting the information you want. You no doubt have a list of web sites you browse daily for updates, whether they’re stored in your bookmarks or your head. If you find yourself loading 20 or 30 sites a day, and you notice if a few stop updating as frequently, you’ll inevitably stop checking them.

What if there were instead some way to have your list of bookmarks notify you when the sites you read have been updated? You wouldn’t waste time checking those that haven’t. Instead of loading 30 sites a day, you might only need to load 13. Cutting your time in half would enable you to start monitoring more sites, so for the same amount of time you originally invested in checking each site manually, you may just end up end up following twice as many.

Syndication provides the tools to do this. A news reader, or aggregator as they’re also known, is a program or a web site that automatically checks your list of bookmarks (which you only have to set up once) and lets you know what’s new on each site in your list.

There are many newsreaders available. My reader of choice at the moment is RSS Bandit, which is open source (free!). That newsreader, like many of the other popular ones are client-side applications. There are also web-based aggregators like BlogLines and Kinja. I use those because they allow me to access my feeds from any computer, even via my Treo 600. And if you’re a Yahoo user you can even do syndication on your MyYahoo! page.

Real Time Blogosphere Searching

Sure Google is a great search engine, but one of the problems it, and other search engines have, is that indexing new content takes a while. It takes two days or so for my new posts to get indexed by the major search engines. There are some sites that allow you to search blogs in almost real time. Technorati and Feedster both index new content within hours or less. (I just used both of those sites to find people who were giving away GMail invites within minutes of them publishing their posts. Try that with a traditional search engine.) There is always something going on that the mainstream news sites aren’t doing justice to. So the next time you’re searching for info on some very recent news try searching through one of those sites. Poke around — both of those sites have some other very useful features besides just search.

Tabbed Web Browsing

Another very helpful thing is to use a web browser that is capable of doing tabbed browsing. Tabbed browsing is especially useful when reading blogs due to the fact that blogs tend to contain a lot of links. Instead of opening links in new windows, or going to the new link and then coming back to the original page, you can just open the links in news tabs within the same browser window. What’s more is that all of that can happen in the background. So your flow of reading will be much smoother, you won’t have a bunch of open windows and you’ll likely be saving computer resources. Just about all of the modern browsers (note that ‘modern’ excludes Microsoft’s Internet Explorer) allow tabbed browsing. Some popular tab-enabled browsers are (my favorite, and also open source) Mozilla FireFox, Opera, and Safari (but I’m sure all you Apple folks are already using Safari).