Marksonland

This past week I spent on vacation with my family. These days, vacations are pretty much the only time I don't have a lap top continually parked in front of me or within arm's reach. But it doesn't mean I go completely dark - I still like to keep abreast of what's going on - I just have less time to catch up on things. So I need to "read smarter, not harder" to steal a phrase.

With that in mind, here's where I got my valley news over the past week:

1. Techcrunch. Not by design or even by habit, just found myself going there first for news. If I didn't check Techcrunch I didn't feel like I knew what was going on in the Valley.

2. Techmeme. My second stop in my news tour. While Techcrunch was my must read, I was fine with getting the rest of my valley news through techmeme.

3. Hacker news. The other tech aggregator in my tour. Techmeme was great for showing me the buzz in the tech world, while Hacker News let me crawl into some of the crevices of my industry. The stuff I read on Hacker News is more becuase it interests me and less to stay informed.

4. Drudgereport. A quick scan of drudge let me know what was happening in the world. It's amazing to me, his page has pretty much not changed for more than 10 years have gone by and it's still the most easily scan-able page that quickly informs me of the world news.

5. ESPN.com. I would go to the worldwide leader not for there articles - they don't have any anymore - but rather for scores.

And that was pretty much it. Notably absent from that list is the perennial time-suck Twitter. I only checked Twitter once or twice while I was away (and tweeted one uninspired tweet). I typically check Twitter a few times a day normally - but when I limited myself to only a short window for online news/ activity, it fell completely off the map. Facebook too fell by the wayside, although I usually check that less than I do twitter.

i don't know what this says about twitter, facebook or the blogs i typically read, but one thing is for sure: I didn't miss them.