Stop surfing the internet
In 1994 I remember showing my girlfriend (now wife) the world wide web. After a quick demo - she thought that it was an interesting toy, but didn’t really see what the big deal was. Funny thing, about a year later she landed a job as a web designer. Back in 1994, most search tools had web pages sorted by category. Of course, that didn’t scale well and I think it’s fair to say that eveyone now knows of Google and other sites that are trying to compete with them.
The thing about the web is that it is changing very fast and if you find that you’re doing things the way that you did even 2-3 years ago, there is probably a better way. Take searching with Google for instance. A few years ago, Google came out with a toolbar. Rather than going to your Google bookmark or typing the url (that’s archaic), you have a toolbar that is always active that can search Google (and also had one of the earlier pop-up blockers). Google search has become so ubiquitous that newer browsers like IE 7 and Firefox have a Google search on the same line as the address/url line (I wonder how many people don’t even know what that box with “Google” in it does). Even with the Google toolbar embedded in browsers, I still use the toolbar because you can customize it with other buttons. I use it all of the time - there is a Wikipedia button (online wiki encyclopedia), Google Maps button and Stock tickers (it has arrows for my top 2 stocks, so I can always watch the red or green arrow and float over for the actual numbers - why have an extra application or browser window open when that’s all I need).
But even the toolbar is still “surfing” the web. If you’re like me, you have a list of websites that you go to on a regular or infrequent basis. For me, I have a couple of websites that I go to for news, business, technical information, sports and my daily Dilbert. I was pretty good with my bookmarks at bouncing through the sites and gathering the information that I wanted to read. There is a much easier way to do things. There are tools known as Feed Readers which allow you to gather all of the information that you want into a single web pane. I use Google Reader, but there are also others (Newsgator, Yahoo, etc). I had heard of these about 2-3 years ago, but at the time I didn’t quite grasp the power. In the early days, it was blogs that mostly had the feeds (what are known as RSS or ATOM feeds), but now everything from traditional news sources, sports teams and everyone else can support the technology - you just need to look for “Subscribe”, the orange and white logo or other buttons that mention the Feed Readers. 
Now you can subscribe to all of the sites that you’d normally go to. The tip that I have is do some organization - create folders (or what Google Reader calls tags) so that you can look through the information that you want easier. I have a folder for blogs (these are all websites that are usually only a few posts per week), news (some of these are putting out dozens of posts per day), and some non-work things (separating sports and Dilbert from the work stuff). If my explanation of the technology didn’t make sense - try watching this video from Common Craft. There are so many tools out there on the internet - Common Craft does a great job giving you the basics on all of the web technologies and tools (I get their updates in my Google Reader to learn new things).
So, if you’re not using RSS/Feed Readers yet, give them a try. As the video mentions - they can be addictive, but it’s so much more efficient than trying to watch a website for new postings or worrying that you’ve missed something from a site that you only stop by once a month. The mouse scroll wheel will become your friend and you can scan through dozens or hundreds of listings to find what is of interest or useful to you.
