Chan's Personal Blog

A year ago, I was lamenting how I had finished reading only two books. I was thinking, that's not good, I'm not reading as much as I used to. Was I get dumber? I had noticed that with my schedule, I rarely had large blocks of time that I could spend reading. Instead, I had these slivers of time available in-between tasks, 5 minutes here, 10 minutes there. This disjointed schedule was much better suited for reading articles and news on the internet.

It was hard to quantify exactly how much I was reading on the internet though. With a traditional book, you had page numbers, and back in my childhood days, we would always record how many pages you had read as a learning metric. Unfortunately with internet articles, it's hard to judge since every site varies in page layout, font, etc.

To help count how much I was reading online, a friend at work introduced me to Delicious, a social bookmarking utility. Basically every page I visited, I could bookmark and tag with metadata. It was also nice that my blog could pull the latest articles I was reading from Delicious (which you see on the left rail here).

Managing bookmarks on Delicious was incredibly useful because I used to use Firefox to manage all my bookmarks, but it was incredibly hard to find old bookmarks. If I was on another computer, I wouldn't have access to those bookmarks stored locally on my other computer (yes, I'm aware latest version of Firefox solves this problem with sync). I've also had Firefox crash on me, and I lost all my bookmarks before. So, it was settled, I would store and share all my bookmarks online with Delicious.

August 31st, 2010, I embarked on my quest to measure how much I read online. In one year, I have amassed 3679 bookmarks.

Here's some stats that I crunched.

Top 20 Domains I Read From

# of bookmarks I save over time.

Top 25 Topics I Read About

america, politics, military, internet, business, technology, google, history, obama, science, china, finances, funny, security, geopolitics, terrorism, revolution, video_games, protest, libya, mobile, recession, yahoo, afghanistan, jobs

Top 20 Domains I Read From

43% of the content I read comes Yahoo!, Business Insider, and Wired Magazine.

Domain	# Bookmarks
news.yahoo.com	620
www.businessinsider.com	497
www.wired.com	494
www.youtube.com	105
www.nytimes.com	79
www.bbc.co.uk	64
www.guardian.co.uk	56
i.imgur.com	49
finance.yahoo.com	47
www.rockpapershotgun.com	38
www.telegraph.co.uk	37
www.time.com	34
en.wikipedia.org	32
english.aljazeera.net	31
techcrunch.com	27
www.washingtonpost.com	27
www.cbc.ca	25
online.wsj.com	24
www.huffingtonpost.com	20
www.reuters.com	17

Bookmarks By Day Of Week

Looks like I read the most on Mondays.

Become a fan of me on Delicious: http://www.delicious.com/the_chan!