Dominik’s Blog

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Over at Subtraction, whose design I find very appealing, Khoi Vinh muses on magazines, asking “does anybody read them anymore?“ The following post germinated as a comment, but I realized it would also make an interesting blog entry… so here it is:

Subscription wise, I only have two magazines/journals that I read cover to cover each issue: The Economist and First Things. Design wise, First Things leaves something to be desired, at least in print, but I find the content enjoyable. Recently I’ve taken to reading most of their articles online, since I actually prefer their website’s layout to their print copy.

The Economist has a tasteful design, which makes it pleasure to sit down and read through it — though here also, I find myself reading about 50% of the articles on their website, which was redesigned a year ago and “clicks” very well with what I perceive as the magazine’s image. I’m no expert in the grid system, but I think I detect some elegant use of it on economist.com — everything seems ordered, elegant, precisely in its place. I’ve recently also tried their new podcast, which is the entire text of the magazine read by professional (British) actors, free for download each week for subscribers. I was positively impressed, but I don’t spend so much time commuting (thankfully) that I can listen to an entire magazine. Still, it’s nice for listening to several articles on the morning and even commute, and positively great for any weekend excursions.

A notable feature of First Things and the Economist is that both are crammed with text and any illustrations or photos are tastefully added as accents, not the main focus. I read TIME when I was 11, and enjoyed it then, but now when I look at it I’m amazed at how little actual information is presented in the articles. They’re just … too short.

As for newspapers, at 23, I never really have gotten into them. I find paper newspaper far too unwieldy and I hate getting newsprint on my hands — they’re just too big to read comfortably without putting them down on a table, and I prefer to do my reading on the couch. I do visit online newspapers though and I like the NYT’s new design a lot — it’s very elegant. Most other newspapers I only visit sporadically whenever Google News brings up an article of theirs.

Find yourself needing to keep track of information from various websites?

Google Notebook to the rescue. With its new Firefox plug-in, you can select text from a web page, click it, click Clip and then put it into an appropriate notebook. It’ll automatically record the URL you found it from and clip the selected text into a new entry, preserving the information in one organized place.

Use it for research or just to keep track of interesting things you’ve read on the web.

I personally am experimenting with using it as a rough and tumble to do list, an annotated bookmark list and a research helper. For example: instead of just bookmarking a page in Firefox, I highlight what I find interesting and then Clip it into Google Notebook; then later, when I’m browsing my bookmarks notebook for a particular topic, I can quickly see why I bookmarked that page, and, if needed, can back to the page in a single click. And finally, as an added bonus, Google Notebook is accessible from any machine with a web browser and internet access.