A couple of people have asked recently how I keep up to date with what’s going on in security, and in technology more generally. So, here’s what I do.
Curate.Me — formerly XYDOBrief — is a good daily digest of the most interesting stories in your network. My account there sends me an email every morning at 7am, for the following topics:
- Your Twitter Feed
- Information Security
- Hacker News
- Technology
- Apple
- Business
- Financial Services
- Finance
Curate.Me has traditionally been pretty fantastic. Recently, though, the “Information Security” topic has become polluted with links to vulnerability advisories, which have floated above more interesting conversations in that domain.
Prismatic is a more recent service, and seems like it might become a successor to Curate.Me. It uses a similar “subscribe to topics” structure (and will use your social networks as inputs), but presents topics in an infinitely-scrolling list in a browser window. The underlying clustering engine does a really good job of grouping news articles, and only presenting the most interesting article for a given story.
I’ve also recently subscribed to the News.Me Daily Briefing service, which has a similar format to Curate.Me. It doesn’t attempt domain filtering or clustering, but just tries to pick out the five most interesting stories that your contacts have posted in the last day.
I use Reeder on iPhone and iPad to read my Google Reader subscriptions. Those subscriptions tend to be opinionated people I find interesting, rather than for strict news. At the moment, these include:
- AnandTech
- Asymco
- John Gruber’s Daring Fireball
- MG Siegler — blog and TechCrunch columns
- Om Malik
- PandoDaily articles
- Jim Dalrymple’s The Loop
For more general news, I subscribe to both the Financial Times and The Economist. The FT sends daily emails with the useful headlines in each section; I usually read the Technology and Business ones, and click through to anything interesting I haven’t already read about.
Rather than read the Economist, I listen to their very excellent podcast; each week, it contains every word of the magazine, read by professional voice actors. You can download it through their apps, but I prefer to podcast it into iTunes and sync into my iPhone using Wi-Fi sync.