For the past couple of years, I’ve exclusively used Twitter as my news source. I mostly follow science and technology news agencies, magazines, and bloggers. I have everything organized into lists. I know what I like to read, and when I’m itching for something new in a certain category, I have no problem finding it. If I don’t have time to read it now, I just queue it in Instapaper, and tweet/share it out later if I liked the article.
As of late, this style of news reading has begun to bore me - all the articles I’ve been coming across are rehashes of the same 10-15 top stories. Flipboard makes reading my Twitter feeds more enjoyable, since it shows me a lot of stories I may miss, but it doesn’t fill the void I found myself in.
Over the last six weeks, the following three (and free) news sources have made finding and reading news more enjoyable for me:
- Digg - Rebranded with tons of interesting articles that are curated by the Digg staff
- TThor - Extremely interesting tech and programming articles
- Launch Ticker - Summary of the best articles of the day with commentary
I’ve noticed that when I read articles on Digg, I usually do it on my phone. The articles are short and to the point. They’re presented in a cleanly format, such that I almost never save these articles to Instapaper. TThor comes out a few times a month, and has about two dozen programming articles from sources that I wouldn’t have ever come across, and they’re all very interesting for those of us who live and love computers. Launch Ticker summarizes hot stories, and sends out a nice email with comments and opinions from movers and shakers in the tech industry. This is great for days where I’ve had little time or interest in following my Twitter stream.
WIth that being said, I leave you with an interesting article I found via Digg and missed in my highly tweaked and organized twitter feed: Artificial Intelligence fights notorious crop pest.
