Information Overload, again
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
Comments
Why must people make things so difficult?
[ade] February 4, 2005 22:46:05.757
There is a fairly simple way of solving one of the many problems that hides under the banner of RSS Overload. If your problem is that you have too many feeds to read then use a tool that uses scoring heuristics(watching the links the user visits or letting the user directly rate things positively or negatively) to rank your list of subscribed feeds. Over time the feeds you prefer float to the top and you ignore any feed that isn't in your top N feeds. The essential breakthrough is realising that you can't read all the interesting things out there and you shouldn't even try.
People who read a lot of feeds are going through the same experience that the literate population underwent when books started being published in ever greater numbers. Eventually people like Isaac Newton accepted that they couldn't read or even buy all the books that were being published. And then they accepted that they couldn't even keep up with all the good and relevant books.
Eventually the literate population set up libraries with librarians who could make informed recommendations and various books that acted as indices of material worth reading. People don't go to the library and ask to see all of today's new books in order to read the lot and people shouldn't seek to read all the new feed articles that came out today. Instead you want to read just the content that passes some threshold you've set.
When people complain about information overload they're often really saying that they have poor mechanisms for managing the flow of information into their lives.
Too many feeds, not enough time
[Mud's Tests] February 6, 2005 1:00:10.129
Here is a thought on the problem: How to manage too many feeds.
Good luck!