Few things are as important to geeks as how they stay informed. Knowledge is so key to us that the ability to pull it in, process it, and ensure that it’s recallable, is absolutely vital to being effective in our work.

One of the main problems we as information fetishists face is the lack of a solid, repeatable methodology for processing new input online. Too often we bounce back and forth between this site and that site, maybe check a blog or two, and then half-heartedly label the task of “reading news” as completed. This approach is not only a really poor way to stay on top of what’s new, but it’s also very anti-GTD.

The GTD Approach

For those not familiar with the GTD system, this essentially means that part of your mind will linger on activities that it doesn’t believe were performed adequately. This is actually a horrible way to go about your day; you want all your brain power focused on your current task, and being “sure” you’ve adequately absorbed today’s new information is crucial to this.

Below I touch on three main steps for accomplishing this goal. Following this simple methodology will ensure that you not only get the best information every time you start a news reading session, but it’ll also help you to actually trust that you’ve had a quality news gathering experience. This trust is what will allow you to move forward in a focused manner, with all your processor and RAM where it should be — on your current task.

Have Quality Sources

At the core of efficient news reading is having quality sources. The phrase, “garbage in - garbage out” comes to mind — meaning the better your sources are, and the tighter they’re tweaked towards the kind of news you are looking for, the more efficient your individual sessions will be.

Aggregation Is Key

One of the coolest recent developments for people who value both time and information has been the emergence of meta-sources, or aggregated sources, of news. Three of these that I deem as absolutely crucial are listed below:

• Reddit
Reddit is an incredible collection of diverse content. The unique thing about this site is its focus on the more intellectual stories, i.e. subjects that branch into philosophy and politics as well as technology. I’ve seen many political sites that are heavier in this area, but none that ride the line between this space and technology so gracefully.
• Digg
Digg is an essential resource. Watching the front page for this site yields perhaps the hottest technology stories of the moment. It’s purely technical, so you’re not going to see it watered down with other types of content. If you’re a technical geek and this isn’t one of your sources you need to attack yourself.
• Populicious
Populicious is one of the most interesting sources out there. As the name betrays, it’s based on Del.icio.us, which is perhaps one of the most incredible projects ever. Essentially, Del.icio.us is a massive, social, database of peoples’ bookmarks.

The key there is the social part; it means that people can not only watch what others are bookmarking, but they can also see what categories they are assigning to those bookmarks. Then, and here’s the rub, you can search based on all this stuff. You can say, “Show me everything my friend bookmarks as Linux related.”, or “Show me everything that everyone bookmarks as Security related.” Well, Populicious shows you the most popular bookmarks from all Del.icio.us users worldwide. It’s most excellent.

In addition to these meta-feeds you of course want to include a number of of other information sources as well. These could range from personal blogs to industry-specific sites that keep you abreast of current events. For industry-oriented content you want to focus on the sources that bring the best content per unit of time. This seems fairly obvious, but being able to make the distinction between “cool”, “necessary”, and redundant is very important.

Not to pick on any particular site, but if you read a lot of different technical sources you may notice that content rarely shows up on Slashdot without first being hitting at least one other site. The question then becomes — do you need that site as well? Look for these types of sources within your list and see where you can trim them.

So that brings us to the most important element of all this — have a list. Having a single list of sources that you invariably use is the centerpiece of efficient news reading. Checking different sources at different times — and sometimes missing a few of the key ones — is not a way to develop trust in your news gathering method. So first and foremost, get your sources together. Tweak them. Hone them. That’s where we start.

Here’s a sample list of sources that’s part of what I read daily. Save that as an OPML file and import it into your favorite reader to get started with a decent set of general and InfoSec related feeds.

Read Efficiently

The second piece of the evolved news reading puzzle is being able to quickly rip through the sources that you’ve decided on. Too many people suffer on this step and end up mangled in a car wreck of bookmarks and open browser windows.

My technique is to use two applications — a standalone RSS news reader and Firefox. I use NewNewsWire for my RSS Reader. The trick here is to operate in two steps:

1. Open your news reader and select the items you want to read, which then open in Firefox as new tabs. When you’re done going through your feeds, close your news reader.
2. Go into Firefox, and starting on the leftmost tab, read each one until you’re finished.

The magic is all in the first step. The reason we as information fiends get so discombobulated when we read is that we often forget where we were as we travel down various tangents. We open a site, read for a bit, maybe follow a link, and then hopefully make it back to the main thread we were on. It’s bad form, and it leads to copious feelings of inadequate newsage. This method solves that by subconsciously saying to yourself:

Once you’ve opened all the stories that interest you and closed your reader, everything you need to see today is now waiting for you in Firefox.

It sounds weird, but this is precisely what your mind needs to hear in order to be able to proceed. Without hearing this you’re left with a quiet nagging in the back of the mind. “Did I see everything?” “What did I miss?” These sorts of thoughts keep you from functioning optimally. But now that you can dismiss this sort of tugging at your attention, you are free to fully immerse yourself in the current task.

Archive

The final piece of this whole absorbtion process is archiving what you find interesting. You do this not only so that you can maybe go back and brush up on it later, but so you can refer others to it easily when it comes up in conversation.

My solution for this is Del.icio.us - a free service that allows you to keep and share your bookmarks online. The key thing about the system is its use of tags. One of the coolest things about Del.icio.us is that, when combined with Firefox Quicksearches, you can do instant URL bar searches of everything you’ve archived in the past (which for me is currently 743 sites). For me it’s as simple as this:

d linux firewall

This simple query put into my URL bar will search every bookmark I’ve ever put on the site that have those two tags assigned to them. Very powerful stuff.

Putting It All Together

Ok, so now that we’ve got all those steps, let’s see how it plays out:

1. Open your RSS reader.
2. Go through your feeds and either read each item right in the reader or open it separately (in a browser tab).
3. When you’ve gone through all your feeds, close your reader; you’re done with it.
4. Go to your browser and start from the left-most tab. Read each item, focusing on the core content and not the fluff. Remember, most items are like 80% fluff.
5. If the item is a good reference or you may want to read it again or show it to others, archive it using a service like Del.icio.us.
6. When you’re done processing all the open tabs, you’re done reading news.

That’s it. It’s a process with a beginning and an end, which is a critical part of being able to break the cycle of inefficient news reading. You don’t want to drift around hoping that you read your news for the day — you want to know that you did.

The cool thing about this system is that you not only cover all your news in a repeatable, dependable way, but you also do so very quickly. This gives more time to do what’s important, namely putting all that newfound information to use.:

“I wouldn’t know what to do if I didn’t have Buddhism.”

– Edit: Oh well, this was a lame attempt at a joke involving the concept of shedding all attachment. Sorry I couldn’t pull it off. LOL

I just got back from SANS 2006 last week and one particular event made the whole trip worthwhile. While getting ready for one of his main keynote speeches, Martin Roesch, the creator of Snort, asked if anyone in the audience had a Powerbook power adapter. I seem to have been the only one cool enough to have a Mac in the entire place at the time (not counting Marty).

So I offered mine and he accepted it. He used it to power his Mac — his own personal Mac — for the entire presentation. We chatted after the demo (along with a couple of other crazed groupies), and he thanked me for letting him use the power cord. Highly cool.

Anyway, the bottom line is that Superman had to outrun a train that day, but he needed someone to tie his shoes. I was handy, and the train was left in the dust.

So I got another phone — well, a Windows device (not quite the same thing exactly). It’s heresy, to be sure; going from a Blackberry to a Windows Mobile device is akin to Satanic worship in many circles.

As it stands, though, there was some functionality missing from the Blackberry that suddenly became very necessary — namely Bluetooth. I recently purchased a new BMW 325i, a new MacBookPro, and a while back I bought a TomTom. All three of these toys have the ability to do cool things with Bluetooth, and the Blackberry devices don’t cut it in this regard. For some reason RIM has ensured that their implementation of Bluetooth doesn’t play nice with others.

So that brings me to the next best thing — that does Bluetooth — Windows Mobile 5.0. The other thing that drew me to this was the fact that I really did need a solid Exchange integration solution, and my company wasn’t about to spring for a BES server.

Anyway, I now have the thing doing basic functions: integration with work’s Exchange server, browsing the web, etc. Oh, and talking and stuff. It’s only hung once so far (in two days), so that’s decent for a Windows box. On the old systems you were basically thankful for uptime rather than upset about downtime.

I’m having some trouble figuring out how I should do my personal mail on the box, though. On my Blackberry I had my dmiessler.com mail coming to it directly, and it was push, so it was like instantaneous. On the Windows device I don’t know how I’m going to emmulate that functionality. Any ideas would be appreciated.

Other than that it’s a new device, so that’s always fun. If you guys know of some mandatory stuff I need to be doing with this thing, do drop me a line.

Well, I was warned.

People told me not to buy the initial version of the Intel laptops, but I figured Apple’s been doing this for a long time — how bad could it be?

Well, this thing is overheating like a mofo. Within 15 minutes it’s too hot to touch over the keyboard and anywhere on the bottom towards the front. This wouldn’t be such a big deal, except my CDRom stops working because of it!

I’ve been trying to install WoW for two days now and it won’t install. By the time I get to the third CD (out of 4) the drive stops working and the box is virtually on fire.

So, I got burned — figuratively. All the hype — all the blogging — all the anticipation — and my system doesn’t even function. I can’t install anything from the CD drive and the box makes me hot just using it.

I called Apple and they told me they’d get back to me in like 4 business days, and that if I call them they’d return my voice mail within 2 business days. Whatever.

If this doesn’t get solved like in the past tense I’m going back to my G4 and getting my money back. This has been nothing but a huge dissapointment.

So sad, too…the system is just awesome otherwise. So fast…so beautiful. I just wish it functioned completely and didn’t cause third degree burns. Baagh!

– (03.09.06) Edit — Well, Apple has stepped up and done the right thing. They are replacing my MBP outright. Way to go, Apple. (03.16.06) Edit — I’ve received the new system and the optical drive works flawlessly. Awesome!

Video: Natalie Portman SNL Skit

So the Intel version of Firefox for OS X isn’t coming out until later this month. As such, I’ll be using Safari until then. Safari is fast as hell on this machine; I can only hope Firefox will be nearly as fast. And if they do something with the nasty looking widgets that’d be golden.

So I’m back from the SANS conference and have some new stuff to mention. First off, here’s my new GPG key:

0xD158D5A3 (3FAB E6DF 3D85 371B 5CE1 EC74 BFB0 AD95 D158 D5A3)

Second, I am posting this from my new Mac laptop.

Finally, my new car (BMW 325i) is arriving this week.

An exciting week, to be sure.