A surprisingly frequent occurrence in my day-to-day life goes something like this: I’ll get into IM or IRC conversations with friends when one technical topic or another will come up. Sometimes the conversation just branches from one tangent to another until that happens, other times the friend will ping me to ask a particular question on the topic. Some friends have even come to know this as a notable quality of mine.
The phrase that I’ve used to describe this quality in my head is “breadth-first thinking.” I thought I’d take a blog post to describe it in a bit more depth. You can find some of this information in the 2007 PHP Advent Calendar entry that Ben Ramsey did, but I’ll reiterate some of it here to bring it into context with my personal methods.
Social Bookmarking
Get an account on a social bookmarking service. I personally like Delicious as its Firefox addon makes bookmarking and tagging (which is extremely important for making things easy to find) a Ctl+D and Alt+S away in Firefox. You’re only as likely to use this service as it is easy to use and this is going to comprise a significant part of your personal database.
Feed Reader
Find a feed reader you like. I use Google Reader myself as it’s relatively frills-free and allows me to use all the functionality I need from the keyboard. Given only a few minutes, it’s easy to make a pass and mark off items that don’t interest me.
Everything Bucket
While Alex Payne may be against them, I think everything buckets are still potentially useful tools. Originally I was using Google Notebook, but when that got shut down I had to shop around for an alternative. I had issues with Evernote consistently retaining formatting in information I saved to it. I tried a few others and finally settled on using private posts on Tumblr.
News Sites
Subscribe to relevant new sites for topics that interest you, but in particular aim for sites that host a variety of information. I find PHP Developer, Planet PHP, and Zend Developer Zone to be excellent on both counts because they often put the spotlight on experiences using PHP and software based on it in conjunction with other technologies. Don’t let it stop there, though. Further explore blogs that they syndicate and subscribe to the ones that carry a lot of subject matter you like.
Social Media
Finally, participate in social media. If you follow people who share your interests on IRC, Facebook, or Twitter, links to interesting content are unlikely to be in short supply. If you use a Twitter client like Spaz that supports Ping.fm, you can automatically push links that you include in status updates to your social bookmarking site of choice.
Search Engines
Google is the search engine most people turn to these days. Once thing I’ve noticed is that it tends to be more biased toward new content versus a search engine like Yahoo which seems to favor more well-established pages. While in and of itself Wikipedia is not technically a search engine nor a good resource to rely upon for accurate information, it can link to other resources that are and should not be discounted as a good starting point for research. For that reason, I frequently link to pages on it, to the point where I’m quite often called a “Wikipedia whore” (all in good humor of course).
Parting Thoughts
In doing all of this, learn to skim information and don’t be afraid to bookmark something that you aren’t sure will have a use later; that’s something you can’t always foresee. Try to be diligent about tagging. One thing this simplifies is linking to a list of links on your social bookmarking site of choice that all have a particular tag. Also bear in mind that there is value in blog posts that draw together a lot of good resources about a particular topic, which is very conducive to this sort of research methodology. Hopefully like this one.