The Power of Three

It's recently occurred to me that my web usage is all based around just the three sites. Very rarely do I access content without first going through these sites.

They all serve difference purposes but all ultimately help me find the content I find useful and/or interesting.

Google
http://www.google.com/
The most obvious of the three is Google. Rarely does a day go by that something doesn't crop up in my everyday life that I need to quickly look something up. It could be anything ranging from settling a bet, looking up some Korn Shell code through to finding out what the latest in the long line of obscure words used by my colleague Bob Quinton means (usually using the 'define:' feature).

Delicious
http://del.icio.us/greggannicott
I use del.icio.us (soon to be renamed Delicious) for storing my bookmarks. Its hard to describe to someone who doesn't use Delicious (or a similar service) just how handy it is to not only be able to access your bookmarks from any PC with net access, but to also be able to store, manage and view so many of them with ease. I would never dream of having 231 bookmarks stored within Internet Explorer, Opera or Firefox, let alone manage and replicate them both at home and in work. Thankfully another colleague of mine, Mark Williams was able to convince me of how handy it is.

Google Reader
http://www.google.com/reader/
Finally, the latest addition to my list of useful sites. Once again I have Mark to thank for introducing me to this and I've not looked back since. Google Reader enables you take a large number of RSS/Atom feeds and easily manage and read them. Thankfully almost every site I follow contains an RSS feed. Whether that is Tech Crunch, Dan Lawrence's blog or the JMS News Feed. Whenever a new addition is made to any of those, an entry appears in Google Reader. This is handled in date order so every day I can go through my list of items, flag up those that are of interest to me and then read them when I have the time. The glory of it being so easy to glance at the content and flag it for later is the fact it enables you to subscribe to even more feeds, whilst not taking up much of your time as a result yet still getting to read it all in the end!