“Readability” is a plugin to the Firefox web browser that lets the user hide all navigation, related content, ads etc in order to focus on the main story. I have tried it a few times and I think it works quite good when tried on pages with a lot of information to read. I found this article from the team behind that tool that discusses the lack of consistent reading experience on the web and overload of related links etc:
http://blog.arc90.com/2010/06/10/why-we-built-readability/
To me, it is kind of an eye opener to how to think about modern day web sites. Do we really serve our customers best by adding more and more content and functionality to the page? Maybe it is better to minimize the accessories in order to attain better focus on the main content?
By the way; note how these bloggers eat their own dogfood – the blog is quite clean and simplistic (without being old fashioned and boring like for example Jacob Nielsen’s Alertbox)