The Daily Procrastinator

Getting information is too much work. There’s no need to browse around to multiple web sites and reload CNN.com every few minutes to get the latest and greatest anymore. Let me show you how to let information come to you, so you can spend more time relaxing, reading and most importantly, procrastinate more.

RSS - (Real Simple Syndication). On most sites these days, you’ll see this image:

RSS Link

This means that you can subscribe to the information the site publishes and pull it into an “RSS Reader”. An RSS reader can be Bloglines.com (my fav), Google Reader or any of hundreds of different software readers out there you can install on your computer or phone. By just using any of the above, you’ve just saved yourself a ton of time by not having to check, or bookmark any of the individual sites that you used to visit. 

Twitter – For real time news, sign up for Twitter. Then follow the people / items you want. Be it Oprah (who for some reason is tweeting to Ashton right now) or CNN. If there’s a topic you’re interested in following in detail, simply go to Twitter Search and search for it and add it to your RSS feed from above. Twitter search also allows you to see in real time what people are talking about on their home page. Besides having Twitter on your phone as an application, you can set Twitter to SMS/Text you Tweets you want in real-time, or you can get yourself a Twitter desktop client.

For Windows users, I recommend Digsby, which also allows you to set up IM accounts for Yahoo, Facebook, MSN, AOL, etc so you don’t have to have multiple IM clients installed.

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That’s all you need. By using these tools available right now, you’ll save time and be more informed when it happens, without having to refresh your browser even once. 

I am in the unfortunate situation of having bought a new car. Unfortunate, you ask? Yes, because I’m getting 2-3 auto-calls per day from companies trying to sell me a worthless extended warranty. This is a known scam and not even being on the Do-not-call list stops them from calling.

Fortunately, there’s a solution for those of us with iPhones. The Blacklist application for $1.99 in the iTunes App Store.

Blacklist creates an iPhone contact named “Blacklisted Number” full of thousands of numbers (over 30,000 and growing) belonging to US telemarketers, scammers, and prank callers so that when one of these numbers calls, you know not to answer because it displays the caller as “Blacklisted Number”. 

Blacklist connects to callerdb.com’s extensive database of problem callers every time you sync. Since I installed it two days ago, I’ve avoided four calls. Installation and sync is painless if you’re on a high speed wifi connection.

With the minutes it saves you, Blacklist will pay for itself. If you’re getting telemarketing calls to your iPhone, you need this application. Why isn’t Vonage doing this?