One day last week we had a conversation in the office about how one of the team felt he could only read bulleted lists these days, or articles/posts which told him how many things he'd have to read - i.e. The 5 best laptops, the top 3 SQL keywords etc. I thought this was ridiculous. Google Reader and Instapaper are my online reading tools of choice. I use Google Reader to keep an eye on a lot of feeds, feeds about development, photography, leadership, dogs etc. I've noticed recently that there are some feeds I only read on a desktop/laptop - these are feeds which contain items I may wish to action (like upcoming event notifications which I may want to attend or tag) or which contain a series of links (like The Morning Brew). These don't get attended to in my mobile versions as it's just too hard - instead they linger around until next time I open google reader on a laptop/desktop. In an ideal world I'd be able to set a preference somewhere that allowed me to mark different feeds as being displayed on different hardware or even simpler according to a filter I'd set up. Some other feeds will be briefly skimmed through before the posts I value as interesting are saved to Instapaper so that I can read them properly, and at my leisure at a later time (the Instapaper iPhone/iPod touch app works really well for this)Still others are consumed within google reader - these are mainly photography related, such as my flickr contacts photos, some visualisation feeds. Basically items which are image rich and again, don't require much attention.I downloaded an online-only iPhone/iPod touch RSS reader app (named RSS) a few weeks ago which is linked to my google account. This comes complete with an Add to Instapaper link making my process even easier and saves me having to do battle with mobile Google Reader (at least 2 clicks needed to get to the proper HTML page for Adding to Instapaper).So, having actually stopped and thought about it for a while, I'm not really any different - a lot of content is skim read with only a small percentage making it into my real, studied, reading list. And even making it on to Instapaper doesn't guarantee that it still looks interesting enough to actually read. My attention window is definitely shrinking, but you'll almost certainly never know this because there are no bullet point lists or top x hints here and you'll have moved on long ago :-)
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