Stephen Yeargin

I believe that there are two groups of Internet users: a group that uses it for a specific purpose and those that idly browse a set of sites on a semi-regular basis. At work, I fall into the first group where any venture off of the company’s internal network is to track down a specific piece of information or to manage a third-party Web service. When it at home, I fall firmly into the second category.

Most of my home Internet activity can be lumped into the two major categories of news sites and social networking. I rarely miss a breaking news alert atop the CNN Web site when I am at home, no matter how mundane the topic may be. I check the local paper either to read news that appears nowhere else or as a bit of an experiment to see what matters in the national context versus the local editor’s take of national events and the associated commentary.

For example, Tim McGraw does not miss a beat (or a beat-down).

Social networking sites provide there own bits of information about the movement and interests of friends and associates, but my activity there rarely lasts more than a few minutes at a time. Digg provides any bit of humor or off-topic news stories that I would miss otherwise.

Aside from an hour or so in the evening watching television or playing on our Wii, I spend a fair amount of my leisure time on the Internet. Lately though it seems like I am stuck in a rut of Web sites that I routinely check. I often notice that I habitually click on bookmarked sites that I really had no interest in reading, but for the lack of something better to do I clicked on them anyway. Looking back into browser’s history, it looks something like this:

• CNN
• Google Reader
• Facebook
• Tennesseean
• Digg
• UT Martin
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

In the middle of that list, I may go to several pages within the site off to a referenced site in a new browser tab. I also have a habit of either purposefully forgetting that I have already visited a site or secretly wondering if it could have possibly changed in the last 7 minutes. After about 45 minutes or so of this, I have to get up and find something else to do or at the very least find another avenue to keep my brain occupied (updating beta versions of web applications or browsing server logs).

I like to tell myself that even this ridiculous patter of browsing the same sites over and over again is somehow better than just watching television (very little is worth watching on network stations in primetime these days). At least I am attempting to be informed by the world around me. The social networks have few redeeming qualities in that regard, unless I really wanted to know who has the current status of “mad at the world” or see all of those random vacation pictures. It can all add up quickly to information overload.

I am really either looking for a better time-waster on the Internet or a strategy to stop feeling like I am just wasting time.