I’ve had a conversation which has gone almost exactly the same way with a few friends. We’ve been talking about reading things online, and I’ve mentioned Instapaper. They respond “What’s that?”, and I try and explain, but generally do rather a poor job, promise to link them, and then forget. So, for the benefit of Alex, Martin, and anyone else to whom I’ve done this: Instapaper is a service which allows you to save blog posts and articles and such (by means of a bookmarklet or browser extension) from the internet, collect them for later and then read them in a much cleaner, clearer format stripped of any extraneous site garbage, and offline, if you want. As you can imagine, it’s very useful for people who, like me, read an awful lot of online content but may not have the time to read it when they find it, or would prefer to read it on their tablet or e-reader (it can send articles directly to your Kindle or export as ePub). It was the first of what have now become several similar services, like Pocket or Safari’s Reading List, but as far as I’m concerned, by virtue of good, clean design, focus, and clarity of vision, Instapaper is still the best. It’s made and maintained by a chap called Marco Arment who used to work for Tumblr, and has a rather good podcast. It’s free to use via the website, and apps are available for a small fee for iOS and Android. Go and use it now, people.