Digital Media
Table of Contents
Essentials
Nowadays, the internet is full of interesting blogs, podcasts, videos, newsletters, tweets, ebooks, and documents. Managing all of this content can feel overwhelming, and often we find ourselves opening news tabs for all the content we want to go through. However, having many open tabs clutter our mental space, making it difficult to focus, thus decreasing our productivity. To solve this problem, we explore applications that enable us to create workflows around processing online content streams efficiently, save valuable items for later, and highlight important passages.
We can avoid opening new tabs or creating bookmarks for online content by using a service to save content for later.
Video
Podcasts
We can use a podcast player to manage and play podcasts. Some features we should be looking for are a well-designed user interface, the ability to change the playback speed, and data synchronization to the cloud in case we switch devices.
Static Documents
Unlike dynamic documents such as webpages, static documents do not change between the times you visit them. For example, electronic publishing produces static documents, such as electronic books and research papers, typically EPUB and PDF file formats. Ideally, publishers would publish documents in dynamic-layout (EPUB) because they adapt to the device’s display. However, many devices lack support for special formattings, such as equations, in dynamic-layout. Hence, many publishers opt for fixed-layout (PDF), especially in scientific publishing. Because devices can adapt fixed-layout documents to device displays, they should create separate print and device friendly versions of the document and publish the source documents.
In an ideal workflow, we would use a cloud-based application for managing documents and add documents directly from the web or computer to the application, which would handle the metadata. The application should synchronize the documents, passage highlights, notes, and bookmarks across desktop, mobile devices, and the web application. We should also be able to review highlights and notes, cite, and share documents. Currently, we have to use a combination of applications to achieve these features.
Social Media
We recommend using the Firefox browser for browsing social media instead of social media applications. As described in the Browser section, the browser improves your control over privacy and productivity by removing advertisements, distractions and limiting tracking.
People should understand that social media platforms are marketing platforms where the users are the product and the advertisers are the customers. Their business model revolves around keeping users engaged on the platform as long as possible to extract behavioral data and attention and sell it to advertisers. Therefore, unless you are using social media for marketing purposes, it is best to minimize social media usage.