What is Pocket?
A quick look at the most important online curation tool I use to find and read content online
Dinner Table Don’ts is a (bi)weekly curation of News, Commentary and Analysis from Peter Thurley. Named after his first blog started while in university, Dinner Table Don’ts is a conversation about all the topics you were told to keep away from the dinner table.
I’m still thinking through the ways I want to curate this space, to make it so that it is useful to people without becoming overwhelming. The last thing I want is endless curation - that’s no fun for me to write, and no fun for you to read!
Before I get going with the content itself, I want to give you a glimpse into how I use Pocket, an online organizing app that keeps my mind straight. I’ve been using it for a few years now to store articles, videos, whatever, from the internet, a sort of bookmark to come back to later. It connects with other apps as well, allowing me to capture online material from around the net without actually trawling for it myself. While Dinner Table Don’ts won’t be able to feature everything I read online, I hope to provide a peek into the various oddball things I finding online and off.
So before I do anything else, here’s a peek at my current Pocket dashboard:
When I find any article online, the first thing I do is save it to Pocket. This allows me to use their article reader, which usually provides not only a clean online reader without ads, but it is also able to get around most, though not all, paywalls. For example, it gets through the Washington Post paywall, but not the Waterloo Region Record’s paywall. Using another app, IFTTT, I also capture content from specific Reddit subreddits; with a predilection for longform journalism, it captures the r/LongReads feed, which I can then come back to when I have some time, as you can see on the bottom right of the image above. My Pocket feed forms the backbone of all my online content consumption. Any time I find something that I want to come back to, I always save a page to Pocket so that I can easily access it later, whether on my desktop or on my phone. The premium version, which I used a while back, provides tag suggestions, unlimited highlights, full text search and the ability to search and access full content offline. One of the things I hope to do with any Dinner Table Don’ts revenue is to buy back a premium subscription so that I can do more for myself and for others – receive no kickbacks from Pocket for this endorsement, I just like the product that much.
Much of the content I share with you will have been found, read or curated through Pocket. If you haven’t yet signed up, head over there now and get yourself an account so that you have a place you can store all the amazing content I plan to share!
I also do not want to overwhelm - each ‘episode’ of Dinner Table Don’ts will be relatively short - there’s no point in biting off more than I can chew, at least not at the beginning. As I grow, I can shift things around, as necessary.
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