Call me impatient. Call me downright lazy. But I tend to get quite annoyed by wading through a million different websites every day promising to tell me the meaning of life, the next big thing… all just in case I find one, just one, interesting subject to keep me in interesting procrastination material. Yes, I’m a tough customer, I want my cookies and to eat them. (And where better than online where they won’t add anything to my hips?)

Fortunately, some clever web techies have lazy surfers like me sussed and have come up with an alternative to sites promising to keep my pulse on the buzz of what’s happening on the web, and then bombarding me with a constant stream of nothing even vaguely interesting. Like SwingVine.

Similar to sites like StumbleUpon, iLike, and others helping us surf addicts find specific, personalized content on the web that may be appealing, with the emphasis on may, SwingVine manages to turn ‘may’ into ‘likely’.

How? According to TechCrunch (the most patient web surfers we know – they’ll wade through everything!) SwingVine can bring you the most relevant and interesting stuff on the web – according to your interests – by “aggregating data and news from across the web, analyzing the volume of online buzz, the reputation of various sources, user interactions on the site itself, and other information to surface the most popular and noteworthy content on the web.” Categories include music, movies, TV, tech, books, fashion, taste, contests, forming what they call “a hybrid of an aggregator of information on pop culture and news and an analytics site that actually measures what people are looking for on the web.”

The site itself is pretty cool. Whenever you scroll over any headline, a titbit of info pops up on that story, either enticing you to click and find out more or move on in a hurry. Then, when you click on a recent story, or album or movie, you will be led to a page that includes a detailed description of the subject, related media, video and images, and a RSS feed of blogs and news sites that have written about the topic.

Of course, if you’re really lazy (I’m not saying I am, I’m just putting it out there…), you can always resort to Lazyfeed. Using Lazyfeed, keeping up with all your favourite topics is, apparently, now “as easy as checking your instant messenger.” Put simply, as they do on their home page, Lazyfeed works something like this:
“Save and forget: Save any topic on Lazyfeed and forget about it. Lazyfeed’s live update feed will let you know when there’s new content about the topic.
Never miss out: The most recently updated topics will rise to the top in real time feed, keeping you always updated.
Get recommended topics: Connect with social networking sites or blogs you read. Lazyfeed will extract topics from the contents and deliver them to you automatically.”

Some of us would actually call this practical rather than lazy.

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