One problem that I tend to have with consuming information from the internet is – I start to feel overwhelmed by all the information that is available. I subscribe to too many RSS feeds, blogs, YouTube & Vimeo videos to watch later and save long articles to Readability.
All this information waits for me in a running inbox as more and more comes in, the information, news, tweets and status updates are truly endless. As we think of how deep the ocean is – the internet has much to be discovered to those looking, the challenge at hand can be learning to cut through the clutter.
Two IOS apps have helped me start to cut though the clutter and comfortably consume new information: Flipboard and Hypemachine.
Flipboard creates a “digital magazine” of several feeds across the internet like: your Facebook timeline, Twitter streams, Google Reader, and so much more. However, Flipboard does much more than just aggregate through your digital subscriptions. Flipboard studies its users personal interests and also content being shared among it’s community which is used to create highly “curated” content streams. For example, Flipboard’s Design feed finds popular content from Dwell or Core77 based on how many users tweeted about it. Flipboard has curated feeds for News, Travel, Fashion and much more. Really, the best feature in Flipboard is a mashup of everything called “Cover Stories”. Cover Stories packages limited selected content that might be of most interest to you based on how you use Flipboard. This, for me, as allowed me to use one application and comfortably browse through my digital content and allow flipboard to cut through all the clutter.
Hype Machine is a web application that aggregates over several music blogs and creates different streams of music that can be listened to from the web site or mobile application. A layer of curated music comes from Hypemachine’s algorithm which studies what it’s user base it listening to more or repeated. This trend study is important to creating Hypemachine’s “Popular” music stream. Much like Flipboard, Hypemachine has created an application that studies how people use their services and tries to automatically conform to each users interests. I find Hypmachine to be a great way to discover new music that I’d never be able find out about listening to the radio or even visiting a record store.
