I usual scan the article for things that catch the eye like bold and highlighted, in most cases this will give you a good idea about the post and the main content. Then if I am still interested then I read it fully while using my imagination to visualize the words into pictures like a story. This helps on many levels.

Thank you again!
Have a Consciously Flexing Day,
~Nicholas Powiull

For a few of these steps I like using a combination of various Google apps and the Flock web browser. Flock lets you have a “web clipboard” that you can drag and keep a number of clipped items ranging from text to pictures into and it will retain the text formatting (such as tables). Then you drag that text back into other things like Google Docs, or to the Desktop as a text clipping, or to an email.

I wish I could get more of my friends to use RSS feed readers because that way I could easily cross-share documents with them via an RSS feed of my Google Share Stuff. I know a lot of folks prefer other tools for doing that, which is fine sine most of those tools DO generate RSS feeds, but I have come to like Google Shared Stuff. I also like that Google Notebook and Google Bookmarks work together hand in hand and you can use Notebook to take notes on a bookmark, or you can use Notebook to take notes on a blog or a feed you are reading. I also sometimes use ShareThis! as well since it ties in to so many other systems (albeit, not particular great into ones like LiveJournal).

Flock also facilities sharing with a “Share This Link Via Email” button in the address bar, and the ability to simply right-click on any web page and “Blog This…” and you can blog easily and nicely straight from the browser (nicely meaning you have access to HTML code) and post to damn near any blog system out there, even self hosted typepad accounts. It’s a sweet piece of work. (It also aggregates all of your social networks into a sidebar, but that’s another story.)