Ask HN: How do you organize the online "content" you consume?

The best process for me at the moment seems to be using 3 tools in the following way. The 3 tools are: Google Reader (through a mac app - Gruml), Instapaper (a bookmarking service thats great for text) and Diigo (a bookmarking service).

- I go through Google Reader once a day scanning for useful things. Anything that I can't go process in a few minutes or don't want to deal with immediately I save.

- Anything I come across during the day (from emails, friends, colleagues, etc) that I want to look at later also gets saved.

- I save things in two ways: articles/text to Instapaper, and everything else to a 'temporary' bookmark folder on my browser.

- When I have some time, 3 to 5 times a week, I'll read through the articles on Instapaper. I'll archive the articles after I read them on Instapaper, deleting any that weren't useful.

- 2 to 4 times a month I'll go through the 'temporary folder'. Deleting anything that isn't useful and and using diigo to archive everything that is.

- The key thing so far for me is to make sure I relentlessly remove anything that I am reasonably sure isn't useful especially from my RSS reader.

Its not as simple as I'd like it to be, mostly because I'm using two archiving services. I like instapaper's ability to easily convert articles into a readable format. At the same time for organizing and archiving everything else diigo works great.

Evernote. I heard the hype and ignored it for a while. I tried it a few months ago on a whim and have been hooked ever since.

We come across a lot of data. Lots of it is interesting, but we don't need it right now. I save dozens of articles a day in Evernote and search it first when researching a topic I'm interested in. It's likely I've saved some great posts on the subject, but haven't gotten around to reading them yet.

I mostly use Google Reader. I use the shareaholic firefox extension to add non-RSS sites to my Google Reader shared items, so I can search for them later - I don't share publically.

To a lesser extent: evernote, readitlater, and firefox bookmark folders.

My mantra: don't archive what will still be there tomorrow, and don't sort what you can search for.

Synced Bookmarks with Google Chrome

Synced Notes with Evernote

Synced Docs/Files with Dropbox

Shameless plug - but worth checking out to solve your problem - we've built a website called Thinkpanda which lets you save notes, links, files, rss feeds and even etherpads in "collections". All your collections are a click away and we even aggregate content from all your collections (and those you are following) into one meta-feed.

We're starting off targeting the academic market (students, researchers) but have found it pretty useful for organizing interest-based links and having general discussions as well.

Check it out http://thinkpanda.com and any feedback is appreciated!

To organise my music and video collections and save information from surfing the web and the 77 RSS feeds and 160 podcasts I subscribe to, I use a partition which is structured as follows:

  multimedia
    downloads
      torrents
    ebooks
      to read
      to keep
    music
      to select
      to keep
    speech
      to hear
      to keep
    text
    video
      to see
      to keep

The "to keep" directories have subdirectories named after authors, bands, genres, movies and podcasts. The "text" directory is for saved web pages as well as normal text files.