Web Worker Daily

The news from the world of print has not been good this week: Newsweek is in trouble. The New York Times is running out of money. The Christian Science Monitor is killing its daily print edition. Anyone watching print media over the past few years knows that declining circulation and the flight of ad dollars to the web have left many newspapers and magazines reeling, and killed many others.

As web workers, of course, we get plenty of our news from the web. And there are those electronic media out there as well. And yet…I can’t help thinking of all the ways that printed information from periodicals has been useful in my own career. I learned a lot of coding skills from reading well-written articles, and I promoted my own services by writing articles.

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I hate learning curves. I hate having to futz and fiddle with my apps to figure them out. I want the functionality to be intuitive, and if it is not, I throw up my hands and move on to something else. I attribute this impatience to information overload and don’t want to have to use a crowbar to insert complex instructions for an app into my brain when it is supposed to make my life easier.

That said, I am so glad that I took the time to seek out a demo of Filtrbox. As someone who is a major consumer of information from the Web as part of my Web work, Filtrbox is going to be my new best friend. Initially, I misunderstood its purpose and saw it as another feed reader. But with some hand-holding from the company, I realize that their term “media monitor” truly is a better fit. And I’d add “little miracle worker” and “fire hose diffuser” to the description.

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