For many, screens at last provide some of the pleasure once only available in print. With Google Reader going away, no need to mourn: read even better. Photo (CC-BY) Sebastien Wiertz.
Reading matters for musicians. It’s a source of essential information about tools and artists, inspiration and knowledge. It’s how a lot of us find music and the ways we make music. Your feedback in eight and a half years of CDM has told us that.
So, with Google Reader shutting down, maybe it’s a good time to reflect on how you read.
Google Reader shuts down forever on the first of July. If you read CDM (and other sites) through Google Reader, or any application that relies on syncing with its feeds, you need to find a new way of reaching us.
Even if you’re not a Google Reader user, one upside of all of this has been that there have been a bunch of new resources for helping you find the best ways to collect news and information. Lifehacker has a great round-up; The Verge suggests similar advice and wins bonus points with us for having a Casio keyboard in the background.
My favorite tool, by far, remains Feedly. It has exceptionally-good tools for reading in the browser, phone, and tablet (Android and iOS). I’ve used it on all of those platforms, and even go from one to another regularly. Feedly has also recently fixed two major problems. First, it no longer relies on Google Reader. Secondly, it addresses the complaint I heard most often: there’s now a Web app that works without having to install an extension. Newsvibe looks similar, but more minimal.
If you prefer desktop apps, FeedDemon Pro for Windows (now free) and NetNewsWire are great options; the latter is weaning itself off Google. I also like Pocket for saving long-form content to read later; Instapaper does the same and supports Kindle.
But we’d like to know more about how you read. After years of offering CDM in essentially the same way, we’re doing some deep thinking about how best to reach you.
We’ve sometimes had giveaways for surveys. For this one, we hope to let everyone win: we want to make your reading better.
Head to the survey directly —
http://cdm.reading.sgizmo.com/s3/
— or fill it out below.