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I thought I’d write down some details of how read content on the web. It struck me recently that the way I consume content from the web is incredibly fragmented, and possibly schizophrenic.

Firstly, here’s an important point — I don’t think I want this method to change. At least not very much. It is seriously serendipitous. Whenever I try some new aggregation app or other I always seem to lose something — opportunity, variety, randomness. Even supposed failures of software – Google Reader’s ‘Show all/Show recent’ toggle always catches me out – seem to add my ability to discover new and interesting stuff. While my content consumption habits have a relatively high maintenance overhead, in terms of personal time dedicated to content discovery, that level of bespokeness is what makes serendipitous discoveries so valuable. If everything was at your fingertips, how would you find what you’re looking for?

Another important point to note here is that nearly all of this content is text. Text is pretty much the only format of content which is painless to consume and transport around the web and between devices. I did recently post to Twitter that I’d like to see an Instapaper for video, but due to right management and file size etc., I don’t think that’s likely to happen.

Also, we don’t really use the computer/web much as entertainment at home. We mainly stick to radio and TV. This is because we have a radio in every room, and a big flat-screen telly in the living room. Watching a video on a 15 inch MacBook seems rather unspectacular in comparison. We do sometimes plug the laptop into the TV using an outrageously expensive AV cable, but the faff involved, and the cables laying on the floor ready to be yanked out by an about-to-crawl infant, mean we aren’t inclined to do this very often. I’m always surprised when I read articles in the media section of newspapers citing studies that say some groups of, mostly younger, people consume all of their television on the web. What are these people watching it on? Are they all squinting at a laptop in a dimly lit room? Do they all have 24inch iMacs or some other sort of high quality AV system? Sounds barmy to me; big fat televisions are what television was made for.

Anyway, enough preamble, here’s how I generally, day-to-day, consume stuff:

1. I start nearly every day by reading updates from Twitter on my iPhone. Before I even read my email. I use Twitterific as a client. I don’t use Tweetdeck, another popular client, because its feature which allows you to split people you follow in to lists and categories means I’m likely to miss something. I’ve pared my list down to a manageable level so that I can scroll through most of their updates in about 200 tweets.

2. While I’m reading Twitter updates, I’ll often see a link someone has posted, to an interesting online article, website, video etc. If I’ve got a fairly good idea where the link is pointing (it might be a short URL like bit.ly, for example) then I’ll press and hold it until a contextual menu appears in Twitterific. I can then choose to save the article at the link into Instapaper to read later. Instapaper is a service which scrapes the content out of web pages and saves it for later retrieval. This is especially useful for long articles I know I haven’t got time to read right now. Instapaper has an iPhone app, or you can go to the Instapaper site and read your saved articles there, although I don’t know why you’d ever want to do that. I use Instapaper when I want to read something more in-depth, usually on a my morning tube commute, although this does mean I have to remember to update the content within Instapaper before I lose my mobile phone signal.

3. If the link is something I know isn’t going to work very well in Instapaper — a video, for example, or a website homepage — then I’ll favourite that tweet to look at later. Favouriting means it appears in my Twitter page in a list of other favourites. As I don’t visit the Twitter page very often, I’ve cunningly put my Twitter Favourites RSS feed into Google Reader. I use Google Reader a lot — of which more later — so I know I’ll never forget to look at that Favourites list. When I’ve got a little downtime I usually open up Google Reader and spend it looking at links that people have recommended by Twittering them. One benefit of this system is that I know who originally sent hte link, because I’ve favourited the tweet, not the link itself. I can then retweet the original source, giving them credit for finding such an astoundingly accurate piece of gossip about the iPad/cute picture of a kitten/in-depth Ars Technica review of the file system of a Palm Pre.

4. I think I spend the longest time of all my reading methods on reading RSS feeds in the Google Reader web app on my iPhone. It’s quick, has an intuitive, simple interface, and AJAX updating of content so I an easily load more items without also having to reload all the other page elements. It also syncs with my Google account, so once I’ve read an item on the iPhone it’s also marked as read if I view the account via my laptop. I don’t think it does offline access particularly well, though, so If I read a bunch of items while I’m on the tube, when I refresh the page I get those same items back, marked as unread. I can also ’star’ items here, although again, if I star an item while offline it doesn’t really get starred in my account, although, confusingly, the interface on the iPhone doesn’t make the offline distinction, and just tells me I’ve starred it. That’s quite annoying, eve more so because of this irritating feature, not of Google Reader but of the iPhone — if I close Safari and go and do something else, maybe open iCal or a Twitter app or something, on my return to Safari the whole page invariably reloads. If I’m offline, I get no content. If I have data access, the page reloads and anything I had marked as read is disappeared. I assume this is because memory is getting swapped around when I use other apps, so the RAM allocated to Safari was used by another app, causing Safari to lose it’s place. Bu you think they would have some sort of caching mechanism to cope with this. I often star items in Google Reader that I want to read again later, maybe to recommend to someone. Actually trying to Twitter or email someone a link from Google Reader usually results in the aforementioned page refresh, so I’m loath to do it while I’m in the middle of reading.

5. At my desktop, usually while I’m eating a sandwich or catching up on my reading at night, I like to check Google Reader and look back over my Twitter favourites and Google Reader starred items. From here, if I want to post or email a link I’ll usually click the ’show original’ link, then get a short URL for it via bit.ly or is.gd and send that.

Finally, here’s a couple of things I do when I’m in a hurry, or in special cases:

6. If there’s a long article with pictures in it that are required or help to make sense of the text, I open the link on either my iPhone or MacBook, wait for the page to load, then just put the phone into standby, or close the Mac’s lid. That way I know when I’m on the train or tube I can just open the Mac or turn on the phone and read the page exactly as it was rendered by the browser. This is incredibly useful for sites like The Boston Big Picture, which is basically just a page full of MASSIVE photos along with some captions. It also means that I often end up with dozens of tabs open in Firefox, waiting to be read. After several weeks this state eventually leads to Firefox grinding to a halt, after which I reboot it and sort through the stuff I’ve been meaning to read in order to close some tabs.

7. If I definitely don’t want to lose a link, or want to forcefully remind myself to look at something, I email myself with it, usually from Twitterific’s contextual menu, or just by copying and pasting the link into Mail or Gmail and addressing it to me. I keep my inbox fairly empty, so I’m always guaranteed to use that link again later.

8. Sometimes at home I use the Wii. If I’ve been playing a game, or if I’m just sick of looking at a laptop screen, or just want to be slightly more sociable, I’ll open a website on the Opera browser, or Internet Channel, as they call it, on the Wii. This really only works for cleanly designed sites as navigation and text display on the Wii leaves something to be desired. I find myself reading kottke.org this way quite a lot.

9. I’ve recently started trying to impose some sort of limiting and order on my web reading, by using the Stickies app on my Mac, and having one big yellow sticky permanently on my desktop where I just paste in every link that I’d normally open in a browser. Then I just open up a few links from it every day, starting at the top of the list with the oldest ones, and working down (I always open up far more links in a day than I actually get around to reading).

I suppose the pattern which can be identified here is that sooner or later I always end up on a desktop/laptop computer, reading text on a screen big enough to do so comfortably, and with the interaction options which enable me to to further disseminate whatever I’m reading. The laptop is my canonical reading library. I love using the web on a mobile device, I absolutely LOVE it; but I’m also satisfyingly aware of its limitations.