Servage Magazine

The time we spend online

What is is that we spend so much time with in the online world (besides work)? Reading an interesting article about this the other day (offline, can you believe it?), I learned that West Europeans spend about 1 hour every day online, reading blogs and news (not work, or other productive stuff, just the daily private catching up with personal interests). On top of that, they spend 15 min every day, checking if new blog entries or news have been posted… I couldn’t help but wonder, if we are all really getting to that point where we – on top of consuming a lot of information via the Internet – also spend another 25% time just to make sure we are up-to-date, or maybe more precisely said “up-to-hour”, “up-to-minute” or just “up-to-speed”… Seriously, is it necessary to do that? First of all, I think it is important to understand the importance of knowing something right away. Many people appreciate the significance of knowing first, since information is one of today’s major assets. So yes, being among the first to know is definitely something we want to achieve. So how do we do it? Going online every hour to check up on sources is really not very efficient… Of course, a clever reader might now think of RSS feeds, push services for mobile devices etc. Yes, the technology is there to help us, so why isn’t it used more? Even I catch myself manually typing the URL’s for my favorite pages multiple times per day…

The things we spend our time with online

What are you reading when you’re online for non-professional (i.e. non-work) things? Is it the hunt for recipes? Gome renovation tutorials? Stock trading tips? Car repair tips? … Let us know about your favorite blogs, websites etc. with a comment to this article! My personal reading list is (and yes, you may laugh!): Springwise (gives me my daily fix of entrepreneurial ideas), AppleInsider (a must for Apple maniacs), Spiegel Online (my favorite general news site), Beinglorious (a fashion/art/culture/misc blog that helps me understand the complicated female mind (a very little bit)…), TheLocal.se (Swedish news in a language I understand…), Engadget (which tech-nerd doesn’t?) and a whole lot more that I read on a non-regular basis.

So, what do you read?