This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: Information Overload, again
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml
Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
The "drowning in information" meme pops up every so often - first it was too many emails, then it was too many bookmarks... now it's too many RSS feeds. It is possible to read too many sources and waste time - this article summarizes the problem quite well:
We have always lived in a world where there was more information available than any one person can comprehend, but before email, the internet, blogs and RSS feeds, the limiting factor was not the existence of the information but gaining access to it. The form of the information limited the speed with which it could be accessed: having to go to a library, find the right book or journal, turn the pages, reading them one by one; gaining an introduction to an expert, persuading them to sit down with you and discuss the matter at hand; or doing empirical studies in order to reveal the information sought. It all took time.
Now the data we seek is easily accessible and the problem has shifted - it's not finding information that's the issue, it's finding the right amount of the right information. The limiting factor is no longer access but discrimination. There is so much information available that it's hard to know which bits to trust.
I've reached the point of too many sources myself - I now subscribe to 300+ feeds, and it's not really possible to keep up (at least, if I want to get anything else done). How Scoble manages to deal with 1200+ is beyond me, and the guy who noted a problem with importing 5100 feeds into BottomFeeder - I can't figure that out at all. It's now possible for lots of information to come in very, very quickly - the hard part (which is what the linked article discusses) is differentiation - figuring out which sources to trust, as opposed to those that ought to be ditched.
Like the author, I have no faith in tagging schemes or meta-filters - there's no real way to deal with the variant categorization schemes people come up with (and the sometimes entertaining results of searches demonstrate the limits to categorizing content that the author himself didn't categorize). Figuring out what to read online is a lot like deciding what books you want to read - you'll find things you like, and get led to related content. Friends will introduce you to stuff they think you'll be interested in. There's no silver bullet here, regardless of the dreams espoused here
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