In addition to design related scrapbooking – often there’s textual content on the web that requires a little extra reading- whether it be technically complex, hard to digest in one sitting – or simply too lengthy to read all in one go.
Whilst many people are partial to the good old fashioned browser bookmark, these can quickly get cluttered with content that you’ve preserved for reference. Worse still I always forget they are there, and end up never returning to them!
Thankfully, there are a couple of web applications and services online that cater exclusively to this need, and have built in “remind me to read” features which I’m sharing here. For longer more comprehensive blog posts that you encounter – having some of these in your browsing kitbag is a must.
ReaditLater
URL: http://readitlaterlist.com/
Read it later allows you to save pages to a browser chrome or web based reading list to read later. Out of all the services here, its one of the only ones that has support for mobile devices (including Blackberry and iPhone) and is one of the few with API support. As a result, they’ve started to gain traction as an offline repository, with some of their userbase, utilising the API to create great third party little ad-ons and extras. There’s a lesson for all startup companies in there somewhere.
Installation as a browser plugin is quick – although it only supports Firefox fully. The latest version of the ‘fox is also needed to work reliably with it, and I had to download the latest and greatest version to get it working.
The main beauty of readitlater is that you can choose to download your chosen web pages for reading offline, as well as having a convenient place to organise and tag directly within the browser.
Unfortunately there is not a social element to the service, and you can’t for example easily browse what your friends are doing, or make friends within the application. I can’t imagine this functionality is far away.
Their Google index at the minute also leaves much to be desired from a user perspective, and from initial digging around -it looks like sitemaps have yet to be implemented to release that information. If my own traffic from the service is anything to go by, they are sitting on a potential gold mine of user data, just waiting to get into the index. Just a head’s up guys if you are reading.
Here’s what it looks like in the browser.
To save a bookmarky for reading later… a useful little icon positioned neaty beside the bookmark icon in the url bar..
And to view..
It’s nice having this on the go with you all the time, as its available from Firefox whether you are online or offline. Highly recommended.
InstaPaper
URL: http://www.instapaper.com/
InstaPaper is a beautifully simple web based tool for saving bookmarks. It works primarily via browser bookmarklets, and with one click, you can add web pages you want to read to the web app. Other features include bookmarking from Google reader, an Iphone app and a developer API.
Signup was quite simple, if not a tad insecure – it simply asks for an email address and away you go (yes you can simply sign-in with paul@webdistortion.com – to see what I’ve been up to – go knock yourself out guys).
For many people this won’t be that big a deal; someone has to know that you use the service to view your bookmarks in the first instance, and who cares what data you store within?
In retrospect, what they lose in service security, they gain in ease of signup and you can literal get going within seconds. Other useful bits and bobs include an RSS feed of your public bookmarks that you can consume elsewhere.
Delicious
Giving an overview of online bookmarking tools, particularly those useful for reading later wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the mighty yahoo property – Delicious. Many of you will be regular users, and I for one enjoy tagging, following tags and reading some of the things other dedicated collectors of bookmarks uncover.
Quite a bit of the research I do for my blog posts comes as a result of searches at delicious – which can easily uncover some of the sites others find useful, particularly if I’m covering a single topic. It’s one of the few sites on the web that has grown to a big enough size to crowdsource useful sites bookmarked under similar tags really well. If you are looking for similar sites to a another, a great tip is to search for the original site, see the tags used, and search for those tags again. In many cases you uncover gems of sites that Google wouldn’t have uncovered.
If you website is lucky enough to become popular and hit the front page of the site, you can expect to get a nice flow of traffic, and secondary links as a result – which is always a bonus.
As with some of the others mentioned here, delicious encorporates an extensive yet aggressively moderated API – and browser based toolbar. They have concerns over the impact that developers have on their infrastructure, and as such require you to inform them in advance of any heavy lifting you will be asking of the servers. The toolbar offers additional functionality for organising your tags, and easier bookmarking, and to utilise fully the power of this service I recommend you grab the plugin. At time of writing it has one of the highest adoption rates – with over 5 million downloads to date.
One of the things I personally wish they would hurry up and implement, is recommendations. Neither users who follow the same sort of tags or sites as you are suggested at present, and it would certainly save me from hunting them down. I do tend to find my close inner circle of friends via other services, but delicious could certain lend a hand in that area – i.e. “Here’s what your friends are bookmarking”.
Many people utilise the service purely as their “read later” repository, and I’d guestimate that the tag “to-read”
Que-It
Que it is one of the few services I’m mentioning here that has a commercial offering – in the form of a yearly charge of $30. The free offering allows you to only save bookmarks for a certain length of time; but for many that won’t be that much of an issue.
Setting up reminders on certain days to read the content you didn’t have time for is a great habit to adopt anyway. I find Sunday mornings with a cup of coffee offers quite a bit of solice for catching up!
Que it installs a permanent browser bookmarklet, which sends data from the browser to the web app, but annoyingly insists on opening its interface upon successful adding of a bookmarking, making it about as user friendly as a dead ferret. Save your money, and stick with delicious which offers a much superior interface for free.
Library Thing
URL: http://www.librarything.com/
No overview of later reading services would be complete without mentioning the awesome yet beautifully understated librarything. With over 1 million members librarything is a social network for book lovers, which allows you to categorise the books you have read, would like to read and much more.
Whilst not strictly for reading online content at a later stage, it does help you organise the offline books you own and want to read- which in many cases is just as important.
As someone who frequently finds himself knee deep in tech related books, I’ve found it a great little service that recommends other titles in a similar way to Amazon – however this is based on peer recommendations, rather than an automated algorithm – which rocks. They also have a relatively little know API, which provides amongst other things book covers which may provide an alternative to Amazon should the need arise. The Zeitgeist for you data junkies also makes for interesting reading, with the most popular book titles on the web available for consumption.
LibraryThing have also done something quite interesting with their “early reviewers” program, they’ve facilitated user reviews of products from their own audience, allowing users to receive books for free in return for a review. You are eligible for the program pretty much the minute you join, however it is operated on a first come first served basis.
This is commonplace within the blogger community at large, with bloggers often receiving a free book or a share of a sale via an affiliate program in return for a review.
Tagging of books you want to read is as easy as pie, and provides just one more place on the web where you can specify what you want to read later.
linky
posted:March 1, 2010 1:23 am
This was a great read, I appreciate the information on what is out there; some of which were new to me.
Kellee Byrd
linky
posted:March 24, 2010 4:34 pm
I use paperspan.com for saving these useful links. And the favorites section is something I like a lot.
John
linky
posted:September 19, 2010 6:56 pm
Just found this little gem too!
http://www.notesforlater.com/
Paul Anthony