One of my favourite things from Google is the Google Reader.  Instead of spending hours trawling through countless websites the updates on my favourite blogs and sites come to me.  It's a masterful idea for many reasons but one i just realised is it allows me to chart my interests.  There are 187 subscriptions on my Google Reader, mostly split between animators and illustrators and a bunch of old comic sites like Stanley Stories .  Up until a few months ago there were a large number of comics "news" sites in there.  I loved keeping up with what was going on in the world of comics at large, who was missing deadlines, who was dissing who, what characters were causing the greatest outcry for whatever reason.  Slowly these sites got lopped off until only The Beat remained.  At some point I realised that, like a completist buying superhero comics long after any interest has gone, I was reading out of habit.  Obituaries aside I had no idea who many of the mentioned creators were and didn't care what they were doing to any character under the sun.  So now The Beat has gone and I'm none the poorer for it.  All the info I care about I get direct from the websites and blogs of the creators I care about and I spend less time on reading things I don't care about.