Content consumption: How do you consume?...An evolutionary tale.

A content-consumption evolution story.

One of the huge positives about content democratization is that we have access to so many amazing writers and articles. One of the downsides is that there are now so many great writers and domain authorities that if we’re not careful, even the good stuff can become overwhelming. I wasn’t careful. I still have a huge amount of clutter in my gmail account that I have to try to sort through…someday…there’s a lot of unsubscribing to do (there’s an app somewhere that helps with that). I admire people like Masha Kubyshina Salvado for picking a couple of key content authors—like Seth Godin—and sticking with email delivery.
Enter RSS feeds…so long ago now…but it was an improvement over email for reading and managing large numbers of articles. Google Reader was the go-to app for RSS “back in the day” :). Feedly is a good replacement IMHO. 
Currently, I’ve been trying to find a system that works best for me so that I read enough of the best articles from the best sources. I was contemplating getting an iPad, but I also wanted some Windows applications available on-the-go. I settled on an 8” Windows 8.1 tablet that fits perfectly in my coat pocket. It has several Feedly clients available, and I recommend “Readly” which lets you read an article in 3 flavors of beautifully formatted “reading mode" where you can adjust font, size, color, margins. Great. 
I also use Evernote all the time. The only problem is…for whatever reason…Evernote doesn’t have a good “reading mode” for viewing saved articles. I love the “Clearly" extension for formatting prior to saving, but once you’ve saved, the reading pane is not great. Windows 8 has split screen and IE11 has a nice reading mode that formats an article beautifully. When I have Evernote and IE 11 side by side, I can click an article in Evernote and have it open in the reading view on IE 11 docked right next to it — works wonderfully.
Many people have abandoned RSS altogether and “converted” to Twitter. I’m not a heavy Twitter user…but I want to be. In the same way that I can dock Evernote and IE11 side-by-side (with Evernote as a narrow “strip” on the left), I can do the same with Twitter and IE11. Click a link in Twitter and it’s displayed in IE11 in reading-mode glory. The beauty of this method, is that the content is already “human-filtered" by your favorite trusted authority.
Oh man…for article reading from your favorite gurus…this is close to heaven.
Does anyone have a good system for content-consumption that they’d like to share?