Wintermute's Blog @ Nitemare Cafe

Over the past year or two, I've been using Bloglines as my feed reader, and I've currently got close to 200 feeds in there. Mostly, I just scan articles there and do one of three things: read it, ignore it, or decide it's too long to read and mark it "keep as new" to come back and read it later. Over the course of the past couple of years, I've wound up with nearly 2000 items marked "keep as new" that I need to come back and read. I've been trying to clean that up some, but it's slow-going.

One day, I found an article on reading faster over on Blog About Your Blog. In that article, I discovered a little gem called Spreeder.

Spreeder is an application that basically helps train you to speed read. I've discovered that the default setting of 300 words per minute to be a bit fast, because I still tend to subvocalize even with the words flying by that quickly. Backing it off just a bit to 290 helps greatly, and I find myself subvocalizing less and less.

Since discovering Spreeder the other day, I've managed to knock about 200 articles off of the "save as new" list, just in my spare time at work. I highly recommend the bookmarklet, because all I have to do is highlight text and click on "spreed!" and I'm off reading something I may have filed for later.

Technorati Tags: reading, spreeder