I don’t know about you, but I read thousands of words a day—most of them online. If current news stories are any indication, most of us today read more news online than we do in newspapers. More than once, I’ve been sent an article to read that I just didn’t have time to right then. At this point, one of three things happens: it gets printed out for later, it gets bookmarked in Delicious for later, or it gets forgotten.
If I printed it, I might read it if it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle of stuff crowding my desk. This is a waste of paper and print too, and not exactly tree friendly. If it’s saved in Delicious, it might get noticed again, but it could be days. I tend to use Delicious to mark things I need to read for work or do writeups on later, so I don’t visit it every day.
I Need to Read This is a bookmarking site specifically for stuff you want to remember and want to read, but don’t want to crowd in with other bookmarks. It can be installed as either a full Firefox extension or as a bookmarklet for any Mozilla product or IE. Even on smart phones.
There are obviously many ways this site can be useful, though it’s intended purpose is good enough for me. Setting up an account is easy and installing the extension or bookmarklet takes only seconds. You’ll find that the service is pretty intuitive and you’ll make it a habit before long.
Basically, when you hit a site you don’t have time to read through (a news story, blog, whatever), you can just use I Need to Read This to mark it. This places it on your “to read” list along with a time-date stamp of when it was added, for reference.
At that point, it’s on your “to read” list. Another click on the I Need to Read This button will load up the next “to read” on your list, whenever you’ve got time to read things. Staying on the page a few seconds marks the item as “read.” The next click goes through to the next one, and so forth.
I Need to Read This was started by two developers who had some spare time and a good idea. Jason Grickly and Benjamin Stover got the idea after figuring out that they were forgetting more “readables” than they were reading. So they decided to fix that. Lucky for us, this is what good geeks do.
It won’t take long before you wonder how you ever surfed the Web without this great little tool. Try it out, it’s free!
