How Do You Get News Online?

Looking at my Reader this afternoon, it’s pretty close to 0 unread, which has been typical over the past few months.

I don’t know if it’s a lack of news or a lack of interest, but not much seems to catch my eye as post-worthy lately. So, I’ve been thinking about ways to branch out from my feeds to other sources for tidbits and news.

Image by nicolasnova on Flickr used under Creative Commons

Readtwit has injected an easy way to skim the links out of my Twitter stream, which has yielded some good stuff. Beyond Twitter, I suppose I could troll my Facebook News Feed for links using their feed or something similar, but would that be worth it? I think to get the best results, I’d need to create a few friend lists first.

So, this begs the question: how do you get news online?

I’ve used the same combination for years in varying percentages:

• Feeds of sites I used to read every day back in the day.
• Feeds suggested by others.
• Feeds I’ve discovered along the way.
• Links people send me by email, on Connect, etc.
• Links from Twitter.

I also sometimes browse mainstream news sites like CNN and NYT, but that’s pretty much it.

I’ve never found much value in services that suggest feeds based on my list (OPML) because they produce a lot of overlap with what I already read. I tried to crowdsource a group reader in Connect, but that fizzled out pretty quickly. It’s an idea I think has some legs though, so maybe Google will add the ability to share full feed lists to Reader. As of now, you can only see what’s shared by your friends, not their full list. For privacy’s sake, it might be wise to allow the sharing of a subset of your feeds.

Anyway, what do you read and why? Find the comments and help me tap into some news.

Update: I guess it wasn’t all that clear, but I’m looking for some recommendations. So, if you comment, let me know the details.