Please note: this is a hopelessly nerdcore, navel-gazing post. Only those interested in the minutiae of online reading, writing, annotation and research should proceed. The following is a continuation of the themes explored in my posts on lifestreaming, large-scale conversations and presence except it is tool-centric and deals with (my) reading, writing and sharing of information.

[Screen captures of Feeds - my current mobile news reader]

Over the last few months I've gradually been sifting through my archives, revisiting old work and attempting to clean up the various messes I've made on a project by project basis. As expected, this has been an involved process and has forced me to examine the systems I have used to organize work, name files and document process over the last decade. It is a messy, thankless affair. More than anything, I've simply been deleting "dead end" design iterations or snippets of information that may have served as inspiration at a certain moment in time but are now junk. In the midst of all this organization and DVD burning I've also been rethinking the applications and workflow that I run on my laptop and iPhone. As I mentioned in March, my laptop died and I wiped my OS X install and started from scratch. In terms of my online reading and writing, I'd kind of been on cruise control for the last two years; Newsgator's NetNewsWire, Red Sweater's MarsEdit and Yahoo's Delicious met my basic needs for RSS reading, blog publishing and social bookmarking. Now that I am doing 85% of my news reading on a mobile device and working on some more involved writing projects, that workflow just doesn't cut it. I remember reading and being fascinated by Michael Surtee's 2007 post about how his smartphone changed his relationship with the web - I guess I get it now.

Here are the tools and applications that I am currently using for:

News Reading: One of my bigger moves was ditching NetNewsWire. Despite my love for the desktop version of this news service, it is clear that the related mobile application is undercooked (and not evolving). I decided to switch over to Google Reader and quarterback my account through Prime31 Web Design's excellent Feeds iPhone application. The reader is quick and readily dovetails with a few means of bookmarking and highlighting content. This review comparing Feeds to rival reader Byline was instrumental in my selecting the application.

Bookmarking: Feeds is fast and organized, but where it shines is how it allows me to categorize content. I've done some RSS pruning and am down to about 275 feeds - my "first pass" involves skimming and discarding content that I'm not that interested in. From there I can:

• Star content - segregate posts for future examination.
• Share content - identify posts that might be of interest to my peers (FYI - my shared items are available here).
• Save content - Feeds lets me download posts to an Instapaper account. This allows me to grab top-shelf content that deserves special attention and savour it later (on my phone) when I am away from the routines and interfaces associated with my general news reading. Instapaper is a type-centric service with an elegant UI that lends itself to close reading. I now do most of my focused reading of blog content while lounging on a couch or on the streetcar - essentially the same moments that I would reach for a book.
• Tag/share content: Delicious is still the best tool out there for building up a no-nonsense archive of categorized links and shuttling them around to friends. My Delicious network is one of my most valuable reference tools. Unfortunately I can't access Delicious through Feeds, but I can always star content and tag it later when I am back at my laptop.

Blogging: I am still thrilled about MarsEdit for banging out posts. It is easy to wire up to the Drupal blogging API and provides a nice front end to the clunky interface of my CMS of choice. I use the drafts folder as a staging ground for sketches, half-baked ideas and potential posts (like that overwrought 4000 word review of Mirror's Edge that never saw the light of day). I generally keep a dozen or so posts in various stages of construction and routinely "kill" content that I've lost interest in, can't wrap up or that gets overexposed on other blogs that I read.

Research: Aside from switching over to Feeds, my other recent change is selecting DEVONthink (pictured above) as my primary research tool. What is DEVONthink? Essentially, it is a flexible application that allows a user to save, organize and search notes, texts and scraps of information. I have two projects that I am using DEVONthink for and every time I find some relevant text on the web I select it, click on a Firefox bookmarklet and automatically save that content (and source URL) to the appropriate database. I can do the same thing with images and could also use DEVONthink as a RSS reader. These actions are great but I consider them of secondary interest as I primarily use the tool to archive my notes from books and articles that I have read.

[notes on Quentin Stevens' The Ludic City: Exploring the Potential of Public Spaces]

I've always considered reading an exercise in editing and I'm a compulsive book annotator. Traditionally, I have created a text file of every book or article that I have read to document my notes and choice excerpts and quotations. This works pretty well in a grad school context (or if you are authoring articles or chapters) and you are considering 10-20 sources for a project. With this amount of material it isn't too hard to keep track of what content is in orbit around the project and remembering the arguments of each of the texts you've read won't be an issue. This strategy doesn't really lend itself to scaling though. What happens when you've got notes on 100 books, 200 articles and excerpts from scores of blog posts? In addition to the fact that you'll be dealing with material that you don't even remember reading, how can you mine this content to create meaningful associations and start to cluster similar content? DEVONthink has some pretty powerful search capabilities that extend far beyond simple keyword queries. My plan is that eventually I can use it to assemble these "free" research projects and identify and nurture connections between the material that I've ingested. I'm treating the software as a vault in which I can store my notes and choice quotes from every book, article and post that I read. Technoculture author Steven Johnson has been using DEVONthink for many years and this past January he wrote a detailed overview on Boing Boing in which he outlined how the application has shaped his workflow. I look forward to taking these search and organization capabilities for a spin once I've built up a critical mass of content.

So there you have it - the several strata of applications that I use to read, bookmark, share and archive information. It is not a perfect workflow and there is definitely some redundancy. I still haven't adequately examined Evernote and Zotero and I will get around to both of these tools eventually. For the time being I am happy with this strategy, it allows me to filter and process incoming information in real time, share it with friends and to amass material for later consideration. Sometimes I have a strange pang of anxiety when I'm about to click on "mark all as read" as that action of discarding content suggests a willful surrender to amnesia. Whether print or web, I want to read now so I can remember (or at least access) later.