Thumbing through the newspaper over your morning coffee and a few minutes of chitchat at the water cooler used to be all it took to stay up-to-date on your world. Now we're faced with a constant flow of information from the internet that often feels overwhelming. The crop of iOS apps dedicated to bringing you a curated, customisable, and attractive stream of content is one way to combat the information overload. Much more than simple RSS readers, these digital digest apps cull stories from across the web and your social networks and wrap them into an iPad friendly and design-forward package. Here's a look at the two leading options.

There seem to be two main growth areas for Australian web sites in 2011: group deal providers, and sites aggregating all those group deal providers. Deal Compactor is the latest entrant we've heard about in the aggregator category, and emphasises its ability to collate deals from multiple sites into a single email.

Windows/Mac: Email client and attachment aggregator Postbox shows off its Mozilla roots by adding support for add-ons—many of them out of the Thunderbird ccoming from theommunity—in its latest beta release.

The subtitle of this post should have been "Tabs versus Home Pages: The Showdown". :)Aka Mike posed the question 'how many tabs do you have open for your main web browse of the day'. I always have too many tabs open, so I thought I'd check out his post and the comments to get some ideas for better tab management.Here's my current morning browsing ritual  - it basically boils down to 2 Firefox windows - one for writing and the other for reading.Each morning I open Firefox and hit the "Work Time" folder of links that I've set up on my bookmarks toolbar. That opens up my CMS, the Lifehacker AU website and our internal photo gallery - everything I need to start work with one click. Next I open up another Window in Firefox (because I like to keep my work page separate to my reading page) and hit the "Blogs" folder I've also got set up on my toolbar. That opens up  my Bloglines page as well as IT Journo (a subscribers-only website for journalists) which gives me access to all the blogs I read. From there I'll open individual stories as tabs if I want to put them aside to read later, or if I want to read the comments on them.There are a few other sites I visit on a daily basis, which include my iGoogle home page (which, if I'm honest, I'm just using to read Twitter via the BeTwittered gadget). I also have Google Talk and Google reader set up on my iGoogle page, as well as the Don't Break the Chain motivational gadget and the Activity Tracker gadget. Apart from Twitter, I also check in on Livejournal and Facebook each day. I'm thinking I should look at centralising my social networking through Friendfeed or Netvibes.So, Lifehackers. How do you manage your daily browsing? Do you lean towards tabs or home pages? Have you centralised through a social networking aggregator or a home page? Tips appreciated in comments.

Daily Browsing Tab Count

While doing some research on social news sites in Australia, I came across a post at Blogpond, which which was a really good roundup of social news aggregation in Australia. We wrote up one of them - Kwoff - earlier this week, but it also goes over a few I hadn't even heard of:

At a glance, redruby (financial), bloggerati (web 2.0) and too right (politics) are each targeting a specific niche. Kwoff maintain their focus will be on politics, business and culture. Confer and Ausculture.com seem more geared to lifestyle, recreation and entertainment.

Social News Aggregation in Australia