Dealing with information overload

Is FeedHub the answer to information overload? « Scobleizer:

I’ve been interested i this topic for some time. Right now I’m reading 848 feeds for my link blog in Google Reader. I’m way overloaded with feeds. Now, imagine I only had 10 minutes a day to catch up on my feeds, how would I do that?

Well, the answer up to now was TechMeme or one of its sisters.

TechMeme actually works great. Tracks thousands of news feeds and every few minutes it remeasures which ones are most important. Problem is that TechMeme only covers tech news. Its sister sites cover gossip, or regular news/politics, or baseball.

But what about 800 custom feeds that you hand picked?

There’s nothing quite like a vacation to bring this point home. It switched me from being a net browser, where I was more-or-less online more or less constantly and browsing my news feeds during those empty spots where I was waiting for something into someone who was offline most of the day, and coming back to the hotel room to find — 1200 unread articles. A couple of hours of plowing through later, it was a real education on just how much time “being connected” could cost. More than I want to spend.

So I spent some time the other night looking at not HOW MANY feeds I read (a bit over 400, the number I”ve generally been comfortable with) but that combination of feed volume compared to the value of the content.

And then I started purging. It’s now 350 feeds, and coming back after a full day on the road, the feed had about 450 articles in it; dropped about 12% of my feeds, but over 50% of the NUMBER of articles. It was actually pretty straightforward: look for the feeds with the largest number of messages and asking myself “when was the last time I got something useful here? and is it worth all this noise to find that?”

Sometimes the answer is yes — one of the busiest feeds was the TSN sportswire (not surprising), but looking at it I realized I didn’t need the TSN feed AND the ESPN feed AND the Yahoo sports feed, because they overlapped so closely, and TSN had the best hockey coverage.

But I also dropped feeds like Luxist; high volume (drives page views!), mostly pointers to other stuff, fun content, but — don’t really need it. This is, I think, a place where sites like Luxist and Engadget and Gizmodo are vulnerable: when people stop to think about how much content they post compared to the value of the content; being primarily farmers of information from elsewhere, they’re logical places to economize your time, unless they are farming a core interest of yours (I have kept Engadget for now, but to be honest, it was a close call; I’m still considering it. Places like Xbox360 fanboy went bye-bye, not because they don’t have good content, but — I’m just not that into them.

I also foldered my feeds not by topic (“tech feeds”, “gaming feeds”, etc), but by priority: “primary feeds”, “secondary feeds”, “free time feeds”, “flickr photos”. That way, if I’m in a hurry, I can just look at my “A list” feeds and leave the rest for later, or use “skim mode” in Google reader to cherry pick a few items and mark the rest read, or simply zero out the lower interest feeds and move on. I’m finding it can save me a hunk of time — which can be better spent creating content rather than trying to keep up with it. All to the good.

Maybe it’s time for folks to start thinking not about how many feeds they read, but how much time they spend reading them, and looking at which feeds are a good value at the investment of that most rare and valuable commodity: time.

You’ll note for the record that Scoble is still on the list, because he’s great at concentrating the larger data stream into a form to help me find the stuff I’m interested in. He is, in fact, a wonderful embodiment of what I saw as a new career path way back in 2003:

Chuqui 3.0.1 Beta: The commercialization of weblogs…:

the data miner — the person who either has a focus on a specific topic (whether it’s alternative music, nanotechnology, or science fiction) and who mines the data stream to supply content on that topic — not so much writing on a topic as acting as a filter on what’s written, much as a magazine editor chooses what stories to publish, and filters the submission stream into a magazine their subscribers want to read… (a third option, somewhat a variant of this second, is the “miner by request”, who’s specialty is finding what they’re contracted to find, but in this case, a weblog is more a marketing vehicle than a distribution tool…)

Of course, that model depended on micropayments, really, and the market moved to an ad-based model instead. Not bad, but instead of my paying someone like Scoble $5/mo or $10/mo to make it worth them mining the stream for my benefit, you have sites like Luxist and Engadget mining the streams, but twisting the content to maximize page views and effectively forcing you through their site (preferably repeatedly). Personally, I much prefer how Robert does it, because he’s more centric to his users, not his advertisements. Maybe he needs a tip jar…

(that 2003 piece actually builds on something I wrote even further back in 2001, but that link’s dead due to my continuing re-arrangement and I need to find and fix that. gah… but that re-organization’s another post in another category….)

I do wish the micropayment model had taken off; it’d make it possible for someone like Scoble to make some money off of what he does without having to turn it into the kind of model Engadget uses; and don’t think I have a problem with that — I don’t, and I’m actually going to be adopting some aspects of it soon — but it’s unfortunately a model that isn’t as end-user centric as it could be.

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