BrambletyePublishing

Is a daily routine possible when faced with interminable data feeds? For at least a decade some of us have had continual information overload; initially from newsgroups, email and chat, and now from RSS, blogs and Twitter. How do you cope with it all, and make the best use of what is available?

You can certainly find some very practical, technical suggestions, such as those from Craig Sherman four years ago¹ or Amit Agarwal in 2007² and they can give you useful strategies for managing your feed reader. But one’s engagement with reading all that information is not just a tools issue.

Even with filters and other machine mediators you still need to do some sort of sifting with eyeballs, be it on the train, at your desk or in a meeting. You will never read everything you think might be interesting. You know you will discard things that could change your life. (Maybe.)³ Francine Hardaway picks up on this and her media consumption appears to be largely online⁴.

These blog posts hint at the discipline you need with all this data that you have chosen to have flung at you.

It comes down to boundaries, which end up defining one’s entire online presence. Your online interaction and persona (”Me 2.0″) can and should be as conscious as your first (real) life.

Increasingly, I’m developing new disciplines and structures to my day, with spaces for reading the feeds, and also those for sitting on the sofa with the (physical) paper, book or magazine, and even being conscious of the differences in the engagement.

You will read the important information when you need it; only then will you be ready for it anyway and will make the most of what you have in front of you.

So, don’t get hung up on the feeds. Let them go.

[Thanks to James McCabe, whose conversation in the Swan in Forest Row tonight sparked this off, and who suggested the title. He's a copywriter; I'm not.]

1. Sherman, Craig. “Managing the Firehose of Real-Time Information.” 17 November 2004. Search Engine Watch. http://searchenginewatch.com/3436591
2. Agarwal, Amit. “How to Reduce RSS Stress In Your Online Life.” 19 January 2007. Digital Inspiration. http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/01/how-to-reduce-rss-stress-in-your.html
3. “Coping with RSS Overload.” 4 February 2009. Remixing Libraries blog. http://librarymix.blogspot.com/2009/02/coping-with-rss-overload.html
4. Hardaway, Francine. “RSS, Twitter, and Information Overload.” 28 February 2009. http://blog.stealthmode.com/2009/02/28/rss-twitter-and-information-overload/

This entry was posted on Friday, 10 April 2009 at 12:14 am and is filed under Blogs, RSS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.