Okay, so we all know about social media and for many of us that is the first port of call when we switch on our computer or pick up our phones. The aim of this blog is to point you in the direction of some of our favourite sites for your daily internet digest of information or some good old fashioned crazy.
We start with the king of user sharing content, Reddit is dubbed the front page of the Internet and for good reason as it is home to everything and anything you might find interesting. The best thing about it? It is all user uploaded and up voted or down voted depending on what the community find interesting. That means that not only do you read the content uploaded but you can interact with it, comment, share and up vote and down vote depending on what you thought. Now, the beauty behind this is the streams of comments that interesting comments creating. Very often large debates start out with people offering their opinion and thoughts and providing any insight they might have. That is why Reddit has become a staple site for many to open up when they open up the Internet. To get the most out of Reddit you will want to make a free account, this gives you the opportunity to upload content that you think is interesting as well as subscribing to feeds you love. This gives Reddit that personal touch and brings up content from all your favourite feeds on your ‘front page’ so you don’t have to go looking for it. Reddit is about to get a lot more image related as they have launched image uploads and ditched their alliance with Imgur. Previously all image content was typically uploaded first to Imgur and then shared on Reddit. This new feature should speed up Reddit image uploads and make it a heck of a lot easier, you can read more about that new feature here.
Feedly
Feedly lets you input information about what you want to see and create categories to split your content up so you can quickly jump to what you want to read. Once you select your categories it gives you some suggested sources to follow. This is not heavily on user upload like Reddit but relies on pre-approved content uploaders like Mashable and Techcrunch for its content. This makes Feedly a good go to for your industry news and info and a good place to get inspiration for your industry blogs. Feedly also has a great save for later feature which means that you can build a little library of useful articles for your perusal at a later date. Best bits about Feedly? Definitely the ability to organise and split up the feeds into topics allowing you to digest everything exactly the way you want to and not having to sift through articles you are not in the mood for. Sometimes cat pics don’t belong next to the news articles and sometimes they do.
This is the equivalent of your glossy mag for the internet. Stepping away from that raw uncut finish of Reddit and the heavily categorised Feedly, this platform organises your content in an easy on the eye format. Flipboard does this by creating cover stories that it displays with a ‘Daily Edition’ really giving it that magazine/tabloid feel. However, there is also the ability to delve into the content that you might not necessarily follow but just feel like exploring new areas of interest. This is where the ‘explore’ category comes in showing you what is ‘new and noteworthy’, uploaded by the readers, news, business just to name a few as the list goes on and on. Flipboard is definitely worth exploring if you want a pleasant online reading experience.
Which ones do we use? We use all of them as they all offer a slightly different experience and are all very useful in their own little ways. We guarantee you will never have a dull moment browsing these sites!