Information Overload
August 23rd, 2006 by Trevor
Lately, I've been getting really tired of opening up the old NetNewsWire and finding over 300 items that I needed to get through. I know I'm not the only person out there feeling the pressure of information overload, but it's just getting to the point where I don't think it's possible to keep up with it all. I love keeping up with all of the news on the interwebernet, but man...
Paul got me thinking about this with a post he made noting the move of his nearly all of his bookmarks to his RSS reader:
No longer do I need to maintain 300 miscellaneous bookmarks that clutter my browser. I can throw those really random ones to del.icio.us, keep the daily-reads and private bookmarks in the bookmarks toolbar and direct the rest to an aggregator. Feeds have really changed the way that I browse in the past year that I have passionately been using RSS wherever it is to be found.
What I found works best for me is going the other way.
Instead of adding more to my RSS reader, I took out the major offenders like Digg, del.icio.us, and reddit and moved them into my browser bookmarks bar. (side note: I got rid of Slashdot all together.) I think that reading sites made up of links is more natural than scrolling through RSS items - and I've found it to be much quicker. The real benefit, though, is that there's less clutter obscuring the sites I read with less volume.
Another thing I decided to do was to stop saving feed items. Why save feed items for longer than they're in the feed? That's against the whole point of feeds: feeds are supposed to be fresh.
Finally, and more generally, I'm doing my best to Fight the Urge to Read Everything in Front of Me. I'm also trying not to to catalogue, store, share, or archive everything I come across. There will always be a way to find that link again... If it was important anyway... If not, I figure it's better to just toss it and consider your life "simplified".
So glad I stumbled across your post on this topic. I’ve been struggling with the same thing for so long I’m practically certifiable! It’s good to know I’m not alone. Which way to the support group?
[...] My sentiments exactly. [...]
I put my delicious links on my blog via an rss-2-html dealie. It acts as a miniature side blog because I’m constantly linking to stuff. If I add any text to the notes field when I bookmark something on delicious that text appears in the screentip. I use Bloglines for rss (ugly but works), to which I just added your feed. I came here looking for plugins and poked around a bit. Glad I did. Good stuff.
[...] I’ve been reading up on world events, web 2.0 sites, AJAX news, marketing, branding and more. It’s been insane. I have the newsreader set to refresh every half an hour, and it includes a couple RSS feeds of searches from digg and del.icio.us, as well as blogs on all of the above mentioned subjects. Within the results returned from those blogs, I often find new and exciting blogs that I add to the feed list. By the time I’ve finished reading all of the stories of interest, there are 50 new stories downloaded and ready to read. While I’m reading I pop open related links in Firefox tabs and when I finish a batch of stories, I jump over to Firefox and read and download some more. It goes on for hours. So I had to make some changes. As far as information overload goes, it just takes some intelligent choices to get the information that matters from the blogs that are the original source of the information. I can flip through most of the digg and delicious links with the spacebar in 30 seconds, and I delete blogs that repost links and do nothing but link to the blogs that I already read. The blogs that really matter to me only post about once a day. [...]
My degree dissertation was entirely focused on Information Overload and Intranets. Fancy a quick read? :)
Carlo
[...] Here are a few more blog posts on how to deal with feed overload: Dealing with feed overload Information Overload [...]