How To Speed-Read the Net
Ditch your browser—RSS makes surfing for news a joy.
For advanced info junkies, there are more extreme ways to dose yourself. Feedster searches the content of thousands of RSS feeds and returns the newest posts first. It's sort of the Google News for RSS, but you can find stuff posted an hour ago that won't show up on Google for days. NewsGator is a program that works with Microsoft Outlook so you can sync incoming news and blogs to your PDA.
No need to begin by going off the deep end, though. Start with SharpReader, cut and paste the RSS links from five or 10 of your favorite sites, and you'll instantly be rewarded with faster, less frustrating Net reading.
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Paul Boutin is a writer living in San Francisco.
Photograph of laptop on the Slate home page by CORBIS.