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About Ian

Ian lives in Brooklyn and is starting a company with a friend.  He used to be gainfully employed as an investment professional at Macquarie Capital, where he evaluated principal investment opportunities and helped dispense investment advice.  Before that he programmed.  Throughout all of this he has been a nerd.

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Tuesday
Dec232008

Enough News!

I've mentioned before that I have a problem with too much information input and not enough time to deal with it or ways to filter it.  I want to have a website where I can go and read the most important news for me everyday that can be read in ten or fifteen minutes, and then get on with my life.

So I put together news.ianspivey.com, which I mean to use for my daily news-reading.  If you use Google Reader, try news.ianspivey.com/r/.

Right now, it lets you read articles on Google News or Google Reader for ten minutes, and then locks you out until the next day.  And that's kinda cool!  But I don't get all of my news through Google News or Reader.  So my next task is to figure out what to do with the content pane.  Aggregation of headlines à la popurls, a URL bar so users can navigate wherever they like, or maybe just the latest lolcat?  I'm wary of making this too complex.

Input would be appreciated.  Would you ever find something like this useful?  What should change?  Is it stupid?

Reader Comments (7)

Ian,

I'd say there is most certainly a niche available for this, and people would find it useful. There are all sorts of forced-focus apps out there to make sure you only see one window at a time, or only do X for Y minutes a day, etc.

I know if I let it my gReader takes over my world. But I do so love the firehose of information.

December 23, 2008 | Unregistered CommenterChris Rohde

I like the idea and I think it has buzz marketing potential. Not sure how this could become a business or how many people would try it. But, if you got some good buzz out of it, you could use that buzz to spread the word about the other venture you are working on.

As for a suggestion, wouldn't something like this work better as a firefox add-in?

December 24, 2008 | Unregistered CommenterVinicius Vacanti

Chris, thanks! I should probably spend a little time seeing how this fits in the world of existing forced-focus applications.

V, I agree that this isn't much of a business in and of itself -- definitely most useful as a little utility! And yes, it would be much more effective (in terms of functionality) as an add-in. But downloading an add-in is a bigger barrier to adoption. I really like the simplicity of something that runs in javascript and doesn't even need a log-in to be functional.

December 26, 2008 | Registered Commenterispivey

As Health is wealth but i think money is wealth and world so we need to become social with the people as doctor serve the patient similarly we can serve the people by participating in social benefits to provide the treatment to people like hospitals therefore i read the article and found the nice tips which are useful for us

i used this post at night when i think about my friends and family so i really thankful for providing very knowledgeable information for further help

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May 10, 2010 | Unregistered Commenterphantoo

Well the best advice I could give is to stop reading, and start doing.

But, also the news site's idea is great haha. I've also tried timestamps like that, but still the best way is to really forget all about it.

Our Developing Mind

freelance writer

June 24, 2011 | Unregistered CommenterFannie22Erickson

freelance writer

July 1, 2011 | Unregistered CommenterRiversAllison

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