My “trick of the month” comes out of my using NetVibes rather than google reader or BlogLines. After a long while of dragging feeds from one NV module to another I had something like a useful set of categories. What I did then was to take the tabs I read most often and aggregated them using Yahoo!Pipes (sorted chronologically, throttled according to recency) and passing the results through FeedBurner (see staffers at Automattic and AcePoliticalBlogs) and, ayup, back to NetVibes. There, instead of a lot of tab each with perhaps dozens of modules, I can have a couple of tabs with 4 or 5 modules in each. And, of course, the individual feeds are still there, just one click away.

What I like about the Pipes functionality is that I can limit the number of items from a frequently updated blog while making sure I get the most recent 1 or 2 from one that’s less active.

- ability to e-mail tasks into the system. I tend to think of lots of tasks while mobile and I e-mail from my Blackberry
- reliability. I have never had any sort of downtime or performance issue.
- the Firefox extension which becomes a sidebar within GMail. This is the killer component. It puts my tasks right next to my inbox. Using the GMail “star” feature automatically creates a task. From the sidebar I can hover over a task and edit any of the data including due date, priority, URL, or mark it as complete.
- their logo is a cow. That’s just plain cool. More web 2.0 companies need cows.

Within Google Reader, things are grouped into four priority based tags (called a-list, b-list, c-list, and d-list). Placement within these groupings is totally arbitrary. They essentially translate to “must read ASAP”, “must read at some point”, “should read”, and “will read if I have time.” I also have a separate tag for photo feeds, and one for comment feeds.

I’ll generally read the a-list pretty thoroughly, whereas the d-list entries are quickly skimmed. If I want to quickly leave a comment on something, I’ll do it right away. If I want to read or digest something more thoroughly, or maybe use it as inspiration for my own blog post, I’ll flag it (using the “star” feature in Google Reader) for followup.

That covers my firehose of information. My main task list is Remember the Milk, which I interact with almost exclusively via the GMail firefox extension sidebar as well as e-mail. I post bookmarks to del.icio.us and spend a bunch of time on Twitter.

1-Google Desktop (news feeds, RSS feeds, and my favorite “Coolest Gadgets” feed)
2-Google Reader. The whole idea of a reader didn’t really catch on for me until about 6 months ago. It’s amazing how much info I can take in through this - especially using my skim method.
3-Twitter. There is something amazing about this tool that I haven’t been able to describe. I mostly just follow Portland folks and am enjoying keeping track of what’s happening in this unique, creative, entrepreneurial group of people.
4-Shared Google Calendars. My wife and my colleagues, share various callendars and then I use CompanionLink to keep these synced with my MS Outlook and PDA.
5-One or two e-mailed newsletters (NYT is primary)
6-Podcasts. My iPod is primarily used to listen to news and presentations while I’m on the road.
7-I’m experimenting with Jott.com, Iwantsandy.com, FriendFeed.com, and NetVibes.com to keep my friends in my loop - but so far I’m finding that Jott and Sandy are my weakest links with the most potential.

From these tools, I follow the links. I often end up at CNN.com and look over the top 10 and the most e-mailed stories. The NYT e-mail often takes me to one or two websites.

It is the Tweets and RSS feeds that are the most fruitful though. These lead me to news, blogs, ideas, and a lot of extrapolated creativity that I can apply outside of the original ideas.