I’ve often wondered about when and where all of the websites out there get their information. I know that many bloggers talk about reading the news feeds and various other strategies that allow them to post quickly on relevant topics. As a professional freelance writer and business consultant, I can pretty much pack every 10 minute block of my day with some activity that directly or indirectly makes me money or grows my business. As such, I don’t find myself able to do the same kind of thing. No matter, of course. The world needs many types and flavors of information, and as it happens, those that I produce won’t be of the current events variety.
But, it was with some amusement that I read through my RSS feeds yesterday. I hadn’t gotten to them in a while and they had built up to around 300 posts. Now, some of you are scoffing because you get 300 posts an hour in your RSS feed, but as I mentioned above, I don’t keep that tight of pulse on the as it happens vein of the Internet. So, I’m usually content to wander back by my favorite sources and read what is available when I drop by, even if it is a month old. For some sites though, this proves to be inefficient, and for those sites I use RSS Feeds and the basic Google Newsreader. In all, I subscribe to less than 20 feeds, some of which are not updated more than weekly, so generally, I can keep up.
Glary Utilities is Amazing, Revolutionary, Life Altering!
I generally just read my feeds from the Home section of Google Newsreader which means they appear in reverse chronological order (most recent first) with no consideration for which site they came from. I like this because I’m looking for interesting content, not because I want to know what they are saying today over at Freelance Switch. So, about the time I read my fourth or fifth post regarding Glary Utilities I started to wonder what was going on.
For those of you who do not know about Glary Utilities, let me say this, you should have it. Glary Utilities is one of those software products that you try out because the fifty other similar products you have had on your computer system haven’t quite lived up to what you had hoped for when you installed them, so you are willing to try the other ones that sound good. Glary Utilities is also one of those products that once you install it, you stop trying the other ones because the one you have does what you want.
In this case, Glary Utilities is a set of system maintenance tools ranging from a disk cleaner (going further than deleting your recycle bin) to an uninstall manager (deleting everything, not just what the uninstall program was coded to get), a memory manger, and more. The best part of Glary Utilities is its Registry Cleaner. If your computer is sluggish or just seems to be doing random things all of the sudden, your first step should be to clean your registry. There are a million products that do this, but there is one product that I trust enough to click Scan, and then click Repair without bothering to verify what it has come up with because it has never once let me down, and that product is Glary Utilities.
Now, I’ve been using Glary Utilities since somewhere around mid-2007 and it has been around for a lot longer than that, so we aren’t talking about new and flashy. So, it was odd to see this:
Now, I get that there is bound to be some overlap in the universe of the Internet and blogs, but these sites are not exactly the dark corners of the Internet known only to a precious few. These are big sites that get read all over the place. So it begs the question, Do these sites all get their raw news from the same location, and if so, should I be reading that instead? Or, Do these sites crib off of each other a little bit, and if so, is there an originator site?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not implying anything here or accusing anyone of copying content, it just makes me wonder about the flow of information and where I, as a reader, fit in that flow. Just for information sake, I did a quick search. According to Google Blog Search, there were 458 blog postings with Glary Utilities between that post on 6-25-08 at Web Worker Daily to today (7-30-08). I guess it was a good month for the guys at Glary.
By the way, if you are wondering, I checked and there is no news during that time, except a 7-18-08 update to version 2.6 which might explain the Lifehacker and MakeUseOf posts.
Good Information Websites
Incidentally, if you are wondering, these websites are some of the best places for information on the Internet in their respective topics.
WebWorkerDaily is a resource for, well… people who work using the web. It’s great for freelancers and the work from home.
MakeUseOf is a resource for all the bagillions of services, utilities, and programs out there on the Internet. When I need something, I always check their directory to get sort of a a top 5 or top 10 list of sites I want to check out.
Lifehacker is a resource for “doing stuff” I will warn you that Lifehacker is a bit of an everything for everyone type place, so there will be a TON of stuff you don’t care about mixed in with the absolute gems that you do care about. They also have a big fat crush on the whole Getting Things Done paradigm. I recommend subscribing to their feed. That way, you can read the headline and just hit NEXT if it doesn’t apply to you. Then, click into the actual articles you want to read