Chad Dickerson: RSS Killed the Infoglut Star. At last, a way to manage the Internet information overload.
Ha! Give it a few months, Chad, and you’ll be subscribing to as many voices as you were visiting web sites! Has anyone else been facing this problem? I’ve been noticing more and more that I’m having an increasingly difficult time in keeping up with my Internet surfing. The reason, it turns out, is that I’m subscribed to 38 different news feeds from websites. To some, this may be a paltry sum–I don’t know how you live. To me, this is a staggering number. Every day I’m enslaved to reading the from 38 different authors.
“Why not cut back your reading?” I’m considering cutting back my feeds down to maybe ten that I read on a daily basis and maybe setting up some bookmarks in Mozilla that will open up a monthly reading list, or maybe a list of sites to read when I’m really bored. The frustrating thing with this is, when you have accessible to you the personal online journals of bleeding-edge technologists, humorists, and theologians, you want to be able to consume them all. I mean, who could resist reading the thoughts of these people on a daily basis? It’s probably a quandry not too unlike working at a library.
As I was talking with family tonight about how they manage their time in the very mundane aspects of planning dinners and living on a budget and so on, I became increasingly aware of how little free time I have–or, more aptly stated perhaps, how much free time I spend trying to keep up the most current trends on the Internet. I remember, too, when Darin went away to Bible school for a year and his description of how freeing it was to be away from “all that stuff,” referring to the daily rat-race of keeping up on technology and his industry in particular. I don’t think I want to get away from that entirely, but, to take a few steps back away from this full immersion of minds and get back to living a little.
There may be a technology solution to this problem, but probably not for the next couple of years. You know, that whole idea of having a semantic user agent be able to pick up news articles of particular interest (like the coolest new Mozilla enhancements) and dump the ones of no interest to me at all (like the latest squabbling over RSS). In the meantime, I really need to do something to keep from going nuts.
Thoughts?
Pick up your guitar and play a coffeehouse. I’d go!
Or… get involved with a community program, like the Youth Group…
(Or just be me)
But do something technology-less, it’s good for you-
Oh here’s one, take you woman out for a swim at the Y or something- I mean, it is summer! AND LEAVE YOUR CELL AND PDA AT HOME!!!
-these are just ideas, obviously, do what would suit your personallity and calling. Oh, and tell your friends to stop checking your blog every 1/2 hour (especially the hairy ones
)…
Jai, you flaming existentialist.
I’m not looking for advice on how to live life more fully (spend time with you children, stop and smell the roses, ride a bicycle through the Sahara, etc.)–I can watch Fight Club or Dead Poet’s Society if I ever need help with that.
Rather, I’m looking more for a technology solution that will help me manage the information I want to be aware of (world events, friend’s writings, Mozilla news, etc.) in a more concentrated format. I had some ideas about this last night after writing this entry, so more blogging about this idea may be forthcoming.
I read well over 38 authors in a typical day, but, I only set out to visit about 15 web sites in a day.
There are many sites out there that devote themselves to finding usefull information. Slashdot is a good example of this. While its geared mostly to open source tech-news, it consolidates a lot of news into one place for easy clicking.
Fark, is another good example. Granted, some of the stuff on fark is just rediculously funny and of no real value (much like most blogs out there) they Do have news flashes and such as well.
and lets not forget about news.google.com for news. So much news, from so many different sources, all in one place. very cool.
Now, I suspect that you are speaking more of “Blogs” than news releated information. I can’t really help you much there. There are only a handful of blog-type-things i check regularly, and only 3 on a daily basis.
However, I think think there are many ways that the information can be handled. But, I think it will require a modification of the rss feeds involved (which you touched on above, sorting out the various things that are of no interest).
Expect the problem to get worse, before it gets better.
Altp.
Ken, You are looking for a technological solution to technology. It doesn’t work that way.
The only way to reclaim time for “life” is to simply reclaim it. Set limits on your “tech news” time or “site tweaking time”
Build a stronger balance.
Now that I have established my belief that technology alone can’t solve your problem, let me state that there are tools that can help /you/ to solve it. The best tool I have seen to help you facilitate this process is called Life Balance, by llamagraphics (llamagraphics.com). It lets you build a heirarchy of “things to do” that can repeat, be one offs, etc. You give each thing a location (i.e. haircuts only can occur at a barber shop). Locations can contain other locations (i.e. barber shop is in the mall) and hours (its only open M-F 9-8 and Sat 12-6). You also give a task difficulty.. i.e. this is easy to do, hard to do, etc. Finally, you create a priority list of your top level items in the form of a pie chart.
Now you have all your tasks rolling up to things like “work” “friends” “tech” “home” etc. and those top things are prioritized. You can now use it day to day by saying “hey, i’m at the mall, what do i need to do?” and it will give you a list of possibilities. You pick them and do them.
The interesting thing about the app though: when it generates the list, it takes that priority balance into account – so it will give you some work things, some home things, some tech things, and /weight/ them based on what you havent done enough of. At the end of the day, you click the regen button, and see a second pie chart next to the first showing you your /actual/ balance. This motivates you to start balancing yourself to your original goals.
Its a bit complex, not super cheap, and difficult to get setup. But if you have the drive, it’s probably the best tool for what you need. They have a book over on their site about how it works (free online) – worth a read, as it really gets in depth on balance strategies, etc. Its good.
That said, I bought it a year ago and still havent started using it properly.
-Ryan
That’s the first time I’ve been called a flaming exsistentialist… I think… Though even after like 8 years of Jode-isms I still don’t know what existential means…
I guess I took your analogy with Darin going away to WOLBI to be something more like “Someone give me an alternative to this mass of information”.
It’s an age old problem of simply not having 36 hours in a day- though I think if we did have 36 hours each day, people would probably say stuff like “if only we had 48 hours in a day”.
“Choose your gains and don’t dwell on your losses.”
In other, more specific words, “Choose the sites you think you could have a hard time without [like http://www.jaiandbecky.com
] and te ones you don’t get around to reading- well, don;t think about them.
Actually, I do have 36 hour days. Problem is, on alternate days its light and dark outside in the morning. And i only have a bit over 243 days a year. Oh, what I wouldnt give for an extra 122 days a year.
K,
Although I don’t have a lot of advice, seeing that WOLBI isn’t an option for you now, you may find this rather interesting:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/business/yourmoney/06WIRE.html
At Cisco Networkers, I’d often see people browsing the web,checking e-mail, or instant messaging DURING a session (thanks to Wi-Fi)! Mind you that the sessions I’m referring to often required 110% of my brain capactity, so I’m rather baffeled as to how they guys derived any benefit from the classes.
The article above speaks to an addiction to information that has come with the new wireless gadgets.
What’s my point in mentioning the article? Well, you could buy a wireless gadget that would allow you to read RSS feeds on the bus, etc, but it’s entirely possible that you’d only find more stuff to read with the device and therefore would be back to your original problem. It seems to me that technology will have a hard time solving this “addiction” in that our brains are often the bottleneck in the whole equation. When you are deeply involved in other people’s lives, your time inevitably comes with the involvement. And when that involvement = weeping with those who weep, or bearing their burdens, I have found that I must limit my information intake because my intellectual resources are in use –in those relationships. So, I can’t imagine a technological solution….
HTH, but it probably won’t.
Mike, I suspect that you’re right–the problem will likely get worse before it gets better. As best as I can tell, anticipation of the semantic web (and those cool user agent things I was talking about) is still at least five years off. Maybe more.
News aggregation sites may be helpful in this pursuit. Rather than reading Slashdot, News.com /and/ Infoworld, perhaps I can just cut back to Slashdot, because they are likeliest to pick up the articles of most interest to me between the three.
Google News is a great example–it would be cool to design a desktop (Mozilla-based?!) news aggregator like Google News and point it at my specific RSS feeds to draw information. That way, if Dave Shea, Jeff Zeldman, and Jai Brinkofski discuss the latest CSS trends, then I can see a headline and pick and choose whose take I want to read.
However, the aggregation technique has its own holes: sometimes I want to read about ideas that no one else is talking about. For example, Eric Benson will have an idea that I think is fascinating, but maybe nobody else does. Aggregators, by virtue of their methodology, would miss these things that would be of much interest to me.
Incidentally, this is why I dropped the Daypop Top 40 from my RSS list:
http://www.kennsarah.net/archives/000247.shtml#daypop-050803
Is Data addictive? – As seen on /.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/business/yourmoney/06WIRE.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5062&en=027a31a06e611f55&ex=1058068800&partner=GOOGLE
This butt ugly link brought to you by Ken filtering the anchor tag out of comments.
I was mentioned in the same sentence, in the same context as Dave Shea and Jeff Zeldman… I will sleep with a smile cracked on my face all stinking night.
Hey Ryan.
“You are looking for a technological solution to technology.”
Sarah originally interpreted this blog the same way as you did, so I’m betting that I was unclear on this particular point. The problem I’m having is not with the technology, but with /managing information/. By analogy, I didn’t start using a spam filter because I wanted to stop using email, I started using a filter because I wanted to more efficiently leverage the technology.
I’m not looking for a way to manage my priorities more effectively. Rather, I’m looking for a way to manage my information flow (“inflow”?) more meaningfully to free up time and do other stuff.
Jai, your point about the 36 hour day (and Ryan’s about the 243 day year)
aptly states the problem. Remember all those ads from the 60’s that promised all this great “space-age” technology will free us up to do so much other stuff? Here we have an example of truly enabling technology, RSS, stifling my ability to do anything else because it’s enabled me to consume more information than I can read!
I think you’re on to the immediate solution of pairing down my reading. I did some thinking last night that may help me not only manage this problem, but continue to keep tabs on the information that I /still/ want to be able to consume, but haven’t yet.
(This is starting to sound like the Lawnmower Man).
Pez (and Ryan), thanks for the link. There’s a sense where that article hits very close to home.
I’m also intrigued by the amount of feedback I’ve gotten from this blog–it would seem that you guys can relate to this problem. Darin, your blog from the other day that mentioned spending 15 minutes a day in some sort of spiritually encouraging text plays a part in this discussion as well. I was telling Sarah today that my time spent slogging through blogs on the Internet that don’t really mean that much to me siphons off time spent doing other things like reading the Scriptures, studying philosophy, or building relationships with people as you mentioned.
I think there is a sense, as many have mentioned, where I just need to limit my influx of information in a decisive way. But, I think there may also be a way where I can be more efficient about the information sources I use as well.
Um… does anyone else think it ironic that a few people posted MORE articles for Ken to read? I mean… I do.
K,
I just noticed your “Related” section when reading the entry. What a cool use of MT tags.