I mean, there are more than five reasons, and frankly I put that in the headline because the pundits say it makes more people read the post, like the numerical approach scratches some itch we have in the reptilian brain or something. In any case, I should say “at least five,” because this nifty little news app is kind of addicting.
In case you haven’t heard of Pulse, you can get caught up at Wikipedia by clicking here.
Now I have used Pulse for a while, and it has many, many competitors. It is kind of like Flipboard and kind of like Zite (which has been my self-curating news app of choice for a while), but somehow it outperforms them for me. First, with Pulse, you are curating actual source streams, rather than curating your interest areas. In this sense, Pulse is less responsive to your likes and dislikes and more responsive to your directions. You tell it, it does it. Your taps on the screen don’t disappear into some black box that generates stuff that the little person in the black box thinks you want to read, as is the case with Zite. (It’s a beautiful engine, don’t get me wrong. Just different.) Or what your friends are reading or recommending (like Flipboard). Pulse lets you work in feeds from your Facebook timeline but I have to say, mine looked pretty weak when compared to the powerhouse sources in my other selected streams. (I love my friends.)
You won’t be surprised to learn that you can install Pulse on all your devices (as I have done). One thing this means is that I don’t have to remember to grab the iPad on my way out the door. All my starred articles along with fresh articles from my feeds are there for me on my Android phone or my iPhone. Or my Fire (on the bed-stand). Or my Fire HD (by the comfy chair in the living room). Or even my Nook Color (sadly, gathering dust on the bookshelf in my study). Then, by logging into Pulse on each device, I have all my stuff fresh and ready to go everywhere at all times. This is par for the course today, but it still turns me on as much as having all my reading with me at all times when I bought my first Kindle 1.
OK, double head fake, there are five reasons. And these would be them, in no particular order:
1. Read better writers. I love reading the New York Times because the writing is just so good, but Pulse opens up a veritable garden of publications that prize great writing to go along with great thinking. For example, give this article a try: Let’s Save Great Ideas from the Ideas Industry, by (you guessed it) Umair Haque. Who is Umair Haque, you ask? Exactly. Where has this guy been all my life?
2. Curate yourself. (Another Pulse competitor, Taptu, uses the “DJ” metaphor, as in “DJ Your News.”) There is a different feel to performing self-curation of streams (no news to avid RSS reader fans from time immemorial) and somehow it avoids the cloying effect of getting more and more articles “like this one” on Zite. Every time I winnow down “what I like” on Zite I feel like my world just got a little smaller. Isn’t the logical outcome that, sooner or later, my Zite magazine would become a solipsistic echo chamber from which I could never escape, kind of like Fox News? I think there is always a place for browsing rather than searching. It’s why I can still spend hours poking around in a bookstore rather than simply following the “People who bought this book also bought these books” recommendations on Amazon.
3. Get inspired. Once you start browsing and not searching, who knows what might tickle your fancy? Without Pulse, I wouldn’t be reading Salon, and so wouldn’t know about the new series on the Bible on the History Channel (I do live in a cave), and for sure wouldn’t have had the chance to read what Willa Paskin has to say about it. Stuff like: “It’s narrated by someone who sounds like he’s fresh off a gig doing a National Geographic nature documentary, which can be odd, like when “Desperate, the Israelites resort to cannibalism” is one of the voice-over lines. God, even when speaking from the Burning Bush, sounds sweet, like a kindergarten teacher, but he has a very faint, unplaceable accent, though you figure God would be fluent in everything.” Nor would I have known about the article by James Poniewozik, who surveys “recent storylines about faith” and includes Friday Night Lights, Big Love, and The Good Wife as shows that tackle faith based issues in contemporary settings for their audiences. All of which are small, small fractions of the audience pulled in by The Bible, at 13.1 million (a larger audience than any for any show last month on mainstream NBC). Which leads to Paskin’s choice of the title for her article, “Is ‘The Bible’ Comfort TV?”
Do I really need two more reasons to make the point? Maybe one is that the size of the Kindle Fire is very comfy to use in bed and doesn’t take up much space on the nightstand. Because it has good battery life, it can just sit there for days and days, ready to feed my brain when I feel like picking it up. (Okay, that’s four.) The final reason is an obvious one: think about how much interest-based reading could go on if kids exercised choice among a whole lot of articles that look interesting. The glimpse into evolution and the x-chromosone I got from reading the article about “the father of all men” being twice as old as previously thought was a bit of a refresher course for me in evolutionary biology.
You have heard of the “flipped” classroom? The discovery mechanism of Pulse could be an important tool for teachers as they attempt to “flip” their classrooms for the benefit of kids. (And that’s five.)
Read better writers. Curate yourself. Get inspired. Sounds like a prescription for 21st-century learning to me.
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