Check out my
Bloglines-Account to see
what I’m talking about: More than 50 news-sources generate about
200-300 news-items for me every day. Gee, great! While it’s nice to
have all those webdesign-trends, music-reviews and mac-rumors in
one place, it’s getting a real burden to keep up to the masses of
information. I’ve even begun to relay news-item into bookmarks for
“later reading” rather than simply dismissing them. While some of
the information is valueable for my job/studies, most of it is just
gossip and pointless info-junk.
Example: Take the whole Mac-Rumors. Even on their first occurrence
they are obsolete, but they get really redundant when being picked
up by other newsmags, often just crosslinking without additional
comments. The “New Powermacs?”-Rumors recently added up to a dozen
items, all talking about the same vague info. Same on the 1001st
“Why Mac?”-article – I just can’t resist to read it, although all
the arguments are barely new to me.
So, what’s the solution? Perhaps it’s just better filtering of
interesting topics, fine-tuned RSS-subscriptions (only certain
topics and tags), or even a personal editor which pre-selects my
news (well, someday…*g*). The most practical approach I found
yet: social bookmarking, which could also be transferred to RSS
easily. Check del.icio.us/popular/,
a service which shows the “hot bookmarks of the day” (but beware,
very addictive!). Another approach is Google News, which uses
software for the same thing (see
Newsmap
for a great interface-idea).
Or maybe…just subscribe less feeds, go out, read a book? Welcome to
the life of an info-junkie *g