Here's a somewhat counterintuitive thing that I've come to believe: theconventional syndication feed reader design is the wrong thing for fast,casual skimming.

(I call this counterintuitive because feed readers were initiallypresented as a great way to deal with a a lot of feeds and feed entries,as just the thing to deal with the river of news and so on.)

With fast skimming, the goal is essentially to throw things away. Youwant to drastically limit your time consumption and limit the mentalload

Writing yesterday's entry hasleft me with some thoughts on creating low-distraction alerting andmonitoring systems. Obviously this should only include informativemonitoring , but once you've got that you stillneed to present the information on what alerts are active in a goodway. And because you want sysadmins to check your alerts page relativelyfrequently, you want it to be low distraction in the same way that emailchecks should be.

A low distraction system needs to show you enough information for youto make at least a