I agree. I get going early and weeding through e-mails and feeds but never really get anywhere. It is like laundry. You are never done.
Perhaps we are just to experience the journey of the information flow and stop looking for the end? I will be interested to watch this conversation and see what other people think.
Perhaps it is not a matter of keeping up then right? We are moving it with it and evolving in the stream of information.
Ernie Oporto
· 2 years ago
Skim. Cat pictures on a blog indicate that feed should be dropped. If you can't keep up, consider dropping others. Feeds are not the "be all end all", they are a means to some other end. A facilitator.
Ben Scoble
· 2 years ago
Do you worry when you finish a glass of water, there is so much left how could I possibly get through it?
Of course not. Robert, your problem is you have so many people trying to grab at you, you will never be able to answer them all.
What you need is a personal assistant.
Someone who can answer emails, keep your calender and do all the other "stuff" that just eats at the clock. This will allow you to do all the stuff you want to do without wondering where all the time went. Go hug your wife, drink a cup of coffee, walk on the beach, all the while your emails and stuff are getting done by your assistant.
David
· 2 years ago
Maybe your trying to cover too much. It might be time to figure out how to either narrow your scope or get some help.
Robert Scoble
· 2 years ago
David: this post wasn't about +me.+ It is about all of us and particularly the companies who are trying to get noticed in today's noisy environment.
Ian Pender
· 2 years ago
Spot on. I'm starting to join the publishing phenomenon (late I know). The tipping point was when I chose Google Reader (thanks Robert). I was a big Scobleizer reader, and kept in touch with a couple of other blogs too (including Mr Winer) using Firefox live bookmarks.
To cut a long story short Reader blows everything else away (but is far from perfect) and enables one to digest, syndicate and aggregate and amazing amount of information (rarely sorted before I've looked at it).
Now then. Now I'm in this knowledge/publication world it's obvious why full feeds are the only option. In an instant I need to decide if I want to consume something. I don't want to fire up a browser. They allow sharing of smaller comments quicker too!!
MY only solution (and o if I had the money) is that we need an offline feed reader. I want to mark items of interest to download later. This should be available on a portable device as well as work and home. Perhaps the text could be converted to a podcast and consumed on the journey to work.
Either way it needs to be always available. If we really do wish to consume all this data, we need to be able to access it at all times.
I suspect, however, we should be using these sophisticated tools to abbreviate, store and index volumes of information so that we can dive in / out as we need to, or as is our want.
Just my onion, sic.
Toby Getsch
· 2 years ago
Robert, I'm thinking two things here.
The first is that I hear you, and I think there is a lot of info out there.
The second is that we don't have to pay attention to all of it and we're kidding ourselves if we think we can.
A couple years ago I went through some counseling and executive coaching. One of the very first things brought up, and a great piece of advice, was to learn a concept called "waterfall listening." The idea is that there is a lot of information that comes our way, like rain drops or drops from a waterfall or drops from a shower. It's impossible to catch all of the drops. But, does that mean that we don't shower or that we don't enjoy the waterfall or that the rain isn't vital and appreciated? We need to learn to absorb the concepts and absorb the intent, and then decide what specific things are important to us and focus in more detail, only on those things.
We can't have a world full of best friends. The reality is that we can have one, or maybe a few best friends. For everyone else, there are varying degrees of friend, to acquaintance, to having heard of, to what or who is that?
As an outsider, it appears that Ben's advice is right on. Or, you can just keep doing what you're doing and keep feeling the way you're feeling.
That's my, "I've been up since 4:30 too." shtick.
Tommi Vilkamo
· 2 years ago
Robert, have you ever been to a library?
You know, there are hundreds of thousands books - and thousands more every year. How to read every one of them? Even if you read several books per day, and even if you would just select the interesting ones, you can never keep up.
The trick is, I think, that you shouldn't try to keep up with everything. You choose.
(Ps. I think your ambition level of following what's happening in the tech world has been just remarkable. Anyway, somehow I have felt lately that you have tried to do too much. But maybe that's just me...)
Jim "Genuine" Turner
· 2 years ago
I rely a lot on the people like Techememe, and try not to read everyone's take on Amanda Marcotte, or Steve Jobs, but get the overall picture and read only those that I really trust and have a good grasp of the real story. This is why people rely on people,like you and Mike Arrington and others. Try to limit the looking at the echoes.
Ben is right, like that feed reader behind and go tell Maryam she looks pretty!
Meanwhile I'll do the j,j,j, k thing for a while. :)
attilachordash
· 2 years ago
"It is about all of us and particularly the companies who are trying to get noticed in today’s noisy environment." For companies and bloggers: Go to unexplored niche territories (there are some) and be original. For bloggers - journalists: A new point of view in analysis, some strange but good analogy and nice visualization.
Nils
· 2 years ago
Nice comments all, about how we shouldn't try to keep up with everything, but I'm essentially the same. I'm listening to music, the TV is on and I'm reading feeds, feeds, feeds. In a little while I will try to watch a DVD and when I go to bed, I will be reading books.
So, what did I do to keep up? I shared this post on Google Reader and added it to del.icio.us so I can come back to it (yes that too).
And I subscribed to your shared items. I'm interested to see what that will bring. I feel like I'm missing out on stuff, you see...
Michael Markman
· 2 years ago
Do we need to keep up? It's a swamp out there. A flood of minor incrementally, marginally improved variations on a small number of themes. There's an old WW II rationing meme that echoes in my head, transmited, of course, by classic Warner Bros Cartoons: "Is this trip necessary?" If anything big happens, I'll find out. Maybe not within nanoseconds of when you find out, but if it's big, it will wait. Change the question, Robert. Not "How do we keep up?" but "Why should we keep up?"
Another perspective: is this an anti-marketing prejudice? Are we so eager to short-circuit marketers that we're willing to invest our own precious cycles in routing around them? Let the innovators bear the responsibility and the costs of making enough noise to get my attention. That's why I love Steve Jobs. He rises above noise. Celebrate marketing. Get good at it. Invest in getting in my face.
Anonymous
· 2 years ago
Just keep skimming the head lines and Shift+N, scan, Shift+A is your friend. Google Reader should order the feeds based on the ones with the most unread entries.
I typically scan headlines for larger sites - engadget,digg,gizmodo and take time out to read smaller/individual blogs.
Anonymous
· 2 years ago
Oh and I read feeds on Google Reader, Google Personalized Homepage, and on my BlackBerry. There's a handy "mark all as read" link at the end of 9 posts for the mobile version. I wish they had the same thing on Google Personalized Homepage.
And on mobile and Google Personalized Homepage, I omit digg to get some variety. Digg is fantastic for finding awesome news, but there's tons of crap there too. It comes with the territory I guess. And Digg doesn't link to the source article in their RSS feed, which completely frustrates me on my mobile device (not to mention Digg has a huge web page, that takes forever to load on mobile devices...and think of the data costs!).
DiggRiver, the mobile verison of Digg, is excellent since they link directly to the source article. But there's no RSS feed on that site :(
Stu
· 2 years ago
As one of the objects (? not sure if that's the right word, maybe subjects, but i think not) of this post, it's an awesome world where there's something such as the blogosphere wherein to pimp our new selves.
I'm not sure there is an easy answer to the problem of keeping up. Not that i'm coming from any standpoint, i get maybe a couple of emails a day. Ha.
But. I would guess that a benefit of doing the hard slog with emails is that one out of the many thousands might just be a real kicker. A true diamond. Maybe that's a good enough reason to continue.
Diego
· 2 years ago
I feel the same way (although I"m sure no where near as many emails and feeds as you need to deal with, Robert). I had to do some feed culling the other day to try and manage it.
One thing I wish GReader had is the ability to sort by attention. Put the feeds which I tend to read more often at the top. So if I don't have hours to read them all, I am at least quickly getting to the ones I usually read.
JoeDuck
· 2 years ago
Just give up, relax, and wait for the computers to take over in 2020. (do stock up on pretzels and beer tho)
Nicholas Ampazis
· 2 years ago
Robert,
As you probably remember, I use Feeds 2.0 to sort news according to my interests and reading history, and take advantage of its memetracking/ clustering feature to avoid reading the same story again and again when it appears in different blogs and news feeds.
Peter
· 2 years ago
You're not SUPPOSED to keep up.
The Internet is impossible to keep up with and you shouldn't try... you'll go nuts.
I've never understood the need for feed readers. I'm not knocking those who like them, but I actually get a sense of enjoyment visiting the actual site. That's what browsers are for, after all -- visiting web sites.
Feed readers, to me, take away the whole idea of surfing. I want to see and experience the entire site, whether it's boring or not.
I read less than 10 blogs on a daily basis. I visit the same 50 or so web sites weekly. I read my news from the same two sites every day. I read my tech news from the same three sites every day.
I keep it simple and I never feel like I'm missing out on what's happening in the world at large or the Internet.
Robert, you obvisouly need to consume more news than the average joe, since you are more or less a reporter, but try and focus only on stuff that makes a difference. That's less than 5% of all Internet content and companies and mew products.
Expensive cameras are boring. Start-ups are boring. Blogs are boring. UNLESS... Unless they actually offer something that's either different or new in some way. A new version is nothing to write home about unless there are serious differences.
Zaine Ridling
· 2 years ago
Hey, I quite my job in order to keep up. I hate email, but it takes me all day to read through the sites and feeds I keep up with. Problem is, it's my job to keep up! But the best way to get noticed is the old-fashioned way: build a better mousetrap, have a good idea. People seek quality, and when they find it, they will tell others.
Hart
· 2 years ago
I think the larger question is: Why have we ingrained in society the ability to increase output (keyboarding/touch typing) while not increasing our ability for input (speed reading)? Instead, as we encourage faster and faster generation of content we seek more and more ways to aggregate/summarize/simply it for easier consumption. It seems to me that this is somewhat backwards.
In a world awash in information, I want to consume content in all its robustness...not through some series of filters that further separate me from the author and the richness of meaning. There is a reason we can't truly advance a conversation, or the state of the art, by relying on executive summaries, abstracts, and the reader's digest version.
Keyboarding became in vogue when it became a necessary means to conduct business. Perhaps we're on the verge of developing (or rediscovering) techniques for consuming and retaining the vast amount of information that we are busily pumping into cyberspace. Technology can and will help…but at the end (or the beginning) of the day, you’ll still have to put in the time to get the job done ☺
Ernie - "Cat pictures on a blog indicate that feed should be dropped."
I'd say the opposite. Cat pictures are an indicator that the poster has a life away from the keyboard, and thus likely to be more than just an echo chamber blogger. (But then I'm biased).
carl rahn griffith
· 2 years ago
Aggregation of same-news feed-items of course compounds the problem (and I am guilty of that in my own blog/s and subsequent feeds generated) so one has to filter one's feeds accordingly to ensure minimal overlap; also, this is just the start - imagine what it will be like when more and more of our interests are delivered to us via RSS. However, by that time the readers will have improved accordingly, to be heuristic for example, I am sure. Still, it's a hell of a lot better than mindless web-surfing and ploughing through yet another HTML email, inbetween all the spam email and viruses, lame jokes forwarded on to you, etc, etc.
I haven't had more than a few days break since I really started using RSS in earnest, and as I receive an average of 350 feed items per 24hrs, it'll be interesting when I do take an extended break - I might miss that major bit of news I was looking for. Still, we will cross that bridge when we come to it.
As an aside, of that 350 feed items average per 24hrs (from some 50 feeds) I am getting an average of 5% of items of interest to me per 24hrs. So, there's lots of room for improvement, yet .... ;-)
What's the ratio for other people here? Will give us a good indicator of how much room for improvement we have.
Joshua Kaufman
· 2 years ago
How do we keep up? It's just like any other aspect of productivity (GTD, etc). You have to have an effective system that works for you and you have to stick to it. For the curious, I just posted an entry about this very topic: http://unraveled.com/archives/2007/02/rss-produ...
Rex Dixon
· 2 years ago
How? Very carefully. Less sleep, more research!
Rex
francine
· 2 years ago
Yup. Got up at 5:15 AM and haven't gotten through everything. Do all the things people above have suggested, like skimming. I think I am going to have to kick my information addiction and just give up caring what's new. In addition to tech, I follow health care and politics, so I am inundated.
We have to sort better. I'm embarrassed to say so, but I am dropping the NY Times Business feed.
gary
· 2 years ago
I had the same problem. I noticed that over a period of days there was a great deal of redundant information posted by similar sites.
Solution: dump either Engadget or Gizmodo. They tend to cover the exact same things over time.
I also removed Digg, which was getting way out of hand, and replaced it with techmeme.com. It tends to cover the same big stories, but filters all the crap.
I also added more, smaller blogs and pruned the big, professional blogs which aren't even blogs anymore (like Engadge and Gizmodo). If they break anything noteworthy, someone else will pick it up.
I will now usually have no more than 100 items when I get up in the morning on Google Reader.
Fred
· 2 years ago
I disagree when you say "It’s much easier to build a company now than it was in the 1990s"
Technically that's right. But create a company is not only do the paperwork and open your web site. The main issue when you build a company is to have products relevant to the market, grow your customer base, and earn money. And I think that's more difficult than it was in the 90s. Specially today, with all the world wide competition and the people expecting every thing free on the net.
That was supposed to be "Notes 8" not an 8) (that'll teach me to put an 8 next to a parenthesis)
jc
· 2 years ago
i almost never read all the daily feeds that i intend to, but I don't reduce the feeds i subscribe to either. it's not that I hope one day i'll have enough time to read them all, but I think it's always better to surround yourself with more information than you can handle than the other way around - you have spare time, but nothing to read.
Henri
· 2 years ago
I completely agree with you. Way too much every second of the. I think I can spend the entire day just reading feeds. And irks me more than the amount of feeds that is the quality. It's seems like blog have become more about traffic and money from Adsense than quality content.
Curt Monash
· 2 years ago
It was said that the last person who knew all of mathematics was Henri Poincare', approximately a century ago. With that as an analogy, I have long said that the last analyst to know the whole software industry was either Al Berkely in the early 1980s or me a little later on that decade. In those days I also read, cover to cover, Business Week, the Economist, a few computer publications, and the equity research of my employer PaineWebber.
But now I can't keep up at all. And it's not just because I've aged and slowed down a bit.
shokk
· 2 years ago
Danny, On the other hand, the blogger may be showing us his cats to give us the hint that we should... be with cats? =) I've seen too may sites post "cat" filler when there is nothing to post. I would rather they did me the favor of not posting on those days since there is so much else to go through. At least before I go off to play with my cats. Where did I put that camera?
47project
· 2 years ago
I agree with the first comment by Steve. Basically we just need to embrace the 'journey' of information like we would the rest of our lives. You get up in the morning and in your life time you will never know all there is to know about all there is to know. Sift through what you can, comment about what you find that you're interested and then at the end of the day, have a cold one and chill out. Reflect on it all.
Every time you would like to add a feed, ask yourself which feed you should remove to make room. How about giving every feed a rolling window? This could be days, weeks, even months if you so choose. If the feed did not have something that inspired (or enlightened or entertained, you pick the verb) in the last X weeks (or days or months, you pick the window), then get rid of it. You (and only you) should decide how many feeds you can handle in total, what scope interests you, and what the right window is. I am not going to tell you what my window is, but for the first time in years, your blog is approaching the danger zone of being dropped :-)
Robert Scoble
· 2 years ago
Ali: that's a great way to clean out feeds.
I better do something inspiring. Personally, the video tour of CERN might do it.
monkeyleader
· 2 years ago
Robert,
Think yourself lucky - at least when you do this you get the feeling that someone is listening. For me the smalltime blogger I do it and then wonder is anyone listening?
All Comments
I agree. I get going early and weeding through e-mails and feeds but never really get anywhere. It is like laundry. You are never done.
Perhaps we are just to experience the journey of the information flow and stop looking for the end? I will be interested to watch this conversation and see what other people think.
Perhaps it is not a matter of keeping up then right? We are moving it with it and evolving in the stream of information.
Of course not.
Robert, your problem is you have so many people trying to grab at you, you will never be able to answer them all.
What you need is a personal assistant.
Someone who can answer emails, keep your calender and do all the other "stuff" that just eats at the clock. This will allow you to do all the stuff you want to do without wondering where all the time went. Go hug your wife, drink a cup of coffee, walk on the beach, all the while your emails and stuff are getting done by your assistant.
I'm starting to join the publishing phenomenon (late I know). The tipping point was when I chose Google Reader (thanks Robert). I was a big Scobleizer reader, and kept in touch with a couple of other blogs too (including Mr Winer) using Firefox live bookmarks.
To cut a long story short Reader blows everything else away (but is far from perfect) and enables one to digest, syndicate and aggregate and amazing amount of information (rarely sorted before I've looked at it).
Now then. Now I'm in this knowledge/publication world it's obvious why full feeds are the only option. In an instant I need to decide if I want to consume something. I don't want to fire up a browser. They allow sharing of smaller comments quicker too!!
MY only solution (and o if I had the money) is that we need an offline feed reader. I want to mark items of interest to download later. This should be available on a portable device as well as work and home. Perhaps the text could be converted to a podcast and consumed on the journey to work.
Either way it needs to be always available. If we really do wish to consume all this data, we need to be able to access it at all times.
I suspect, however, we should be using these sophisticated tools to abbreviate, store and index volumes of information so that we can dive in / out as we need to, or as is our want.
Just my onion, sic.
The first is that I hear you, and I think there is a lot of info out there.
The second is that we don't have to pay attention to all of it and we're kidding ourselves if we think we can.
A couple years ago I went through some counseling and executive coaching. One of the very first things brought up, and a great piece of advice, was to learn a concept called "waterfall listening." The idea is that there is a lot of information that comes our way, like rain drops or drops from a waterfall or drops from a shower. It's impossible to catch all of the drops. But, does that mean that we don't shower or that we don't enjoy the waterfall or that the rain isn't vital and appreciated? We need to learn to absorb the concepts and absorb the intent, and then decide what specific things are important to us and focus in more detail, only on those things.
We can't have a world full of best friends. The reality is that we can have one, or maybe a few best friends. For everyone else, there are varying degrees of friend, to acquaintance, to having heard of, to what or who is that?
As an outsider, it appears that Ben's advice is right on. Or, you can just keep doing what you're doing and keep feeling the way you're feeling.
That's my, "I've been up since 4:30 too." shtick.
You know, there are hundreds of thousands books - and thousands more every year. How to read every one of them? Even if you read several books per day, and even if you would just select the interesting ones, you can never keep up.
The trick is, I think, that you shouldn't try to keep up with everything. You choose.
(Ps. I think your ambition level of following what's happening in the tech world has been just remarkable. Anyway, somehow I have felt lately that you have tried to do too much. But maybe that's just me...)
Ben is right, like that feed reader behind and go tell Maryam she looks pretty!
Meanwhile I'll do the j,j,j, k thing for a while. :)
For companies and bloggers: Go to unexplored niche territories (there are some) and be original. For bloggers - journalists: A new point of view in analysis, some strange but good analogy and nice visualization.
So, what did I do to keep up? I shared this post on Google Reader and added it to del.icio.us so I can come back to it (yes that too).
And I subscribed to your shared items. I'm interested to see what that will bring. I feel like I'm missing out on stuff, you see...
Another perspective: is this an anti-marketing prejudice? Are we so eager to short-circuit marketers that we're willing to invest our own precious cycles in routing around them? Let the innovators bear the responsibility and the costs of making enough noise to get my attention. That's why I love Steve Jobs. He rises above noise. Celebrate marketing. Get good at it. Invest in getting in my face.
I typically scan headlines for larger sites - engadget,digg,gizmodo and take time out to read smaller/individual blogs.
And on mobile and Google Personalized Homepage, I omit digg to get some variety. Digg is fantastic for finding awesome news, but there's tons of crap there too. It comes with the territory I guess. And Digg doesn't link to the source article in their RSS feed, which completely frustrates me on my mobile device (not to mention Digg has a huge web page, that takes forever to load on mobile devices...and think of the data costs!).
DiggRiver, the mobile verison of Digg, is excellent since they link directly to the source article. But there's no RSS feed on that site :(
I'm not sure there is an easy answer to the problem of keeping up. Not that i'm coming from any standpoint, i get maybe a couple of emails a day. Ha.
But. I would guess that a benefit of doing the hard slog with emails is that one out of the many thousands might just be a real kicker. A true diamond. Maybe that's a good enough reason to continue.
One thing I wish GReader had is the ability to sort by attention. Put the feeds which I tend to read more often at the top. So if I don't have hours to read them all, I am at least quickly getting to the ones I usually read.
As you probably remember, I use Feeds 2.0 to sort news according to my interests and reading history, and take advantage of its memetracking/ clustering feature to avoid reading the same story again and again when it appears in different blogs and news feeds.
The Internet is impossible to keep up with and you shouldn't try... you'll go nuts.
I've never understood the need for feed readers. I'm not knocking those who like them, but I actually get a sense of enjoyment visiting the actual site. That's what browsers are for, after all -- visiting web sites.
Feed readers, to me, take away the whole idea of surfing. I want to see and experience the entire site, whether it's boring or not.
I read less than 10 blogs on a daily basis. I visit the same 50 or so web sites weekly. I read my news from the same two sites every day. I read my tech news from the same three sites every day.
I keep it simple and I never feel like I'm missing out on what's happening in the world at large or the Internet.
Robert, you obvisouly need to consume more news than the average joe, since you are more or less a reporter, but try and focus only on stuff that makes a difference. That's less than 5% of all Internet content and companies and mew products.
Expensive cameras are boring. Start-ups are boring. Blogs are boring. UNLESS... Unless they actually offer something that's either different or new in some way. A new version is nothing to write home about unless there are serious differences.
In a world awash in information, I want to consume content in all its robustness...not through some series of filters that further separate me from the author and the richness of meaning. There is a reason we can't truly advance a conversation, or the state of the art, by relying on executive summaries, abstracts, and the reader's digest version.
Keyboarding became in vogue when it became a necessary means to conduct business. Perhaps we're on the verge of developing (or rediscovering) techniques for consuming and retaining the vast amount of information that we are busily pumping into cyberspace. Technology can and will help…but at the end (or the beginning) of the day, you’ll still have to put in the time to get the job done ☺
http://thomashawk.com/2007/02/cat-spanking.html
I'd say the opposite. Cat pictures are an indicator that the poster has a life away from the keyboard, and thus likely to be more than just an echo chamber blogger. (But then I'm biased).
I haven't had more than a few days break since I really started using RSS in earnest, and as I receive an average of 350 feed items per 24hrs, it'll be interesting when I do take an extended break - I might miss that major bit of news I was looking for. Still, we will cross that bridge when we come to it.
As an aside, of that 350 feed items average per 24hrs (from some 50 feeds) I am getting an average of 5% of items of interest to me per 24hrs. So, there's lots of room for improvement, yet .... ;-)
What's the ratio for other people here? Will give us a good indicator of how much room for improvement we have.
http://unraveled.com/archives/2007/02/rss-produ...
Rex
We have to sort better. I'm embarrassed to say so, but I am dropping the NY Times Business feed.
Solution: dump either Engadget or Gizmodo. They tend to cover the exact same things over time.
I also removed Digg, which was getting way out of hand, and replaced it with techmeme.com. It tends to cover the same big stories, but filters all the crap.
I also added more, smaller blogs and pruned the big, professional blogs which aren't even blogs anymore (like Engadge and Gizmodo). If they break anything noteworthy, someone else will pick it up.
I will now usually have no more than 100 items when I get up in the morning on Google Reader.
Technically that's right. But create a company is not only do the paperwork and open your web site. The main issue when you build a company is to have products relevant to the market, grow your customer base, and earn money. And I think that's more difficult than it was in the 90s. Specially today, with all the world wide competition and the people expecting every thing free on the net.
The next version of Lotus Notes (Notes 8) will have a feed reader with offline abilities.
http://www.jeffeisen.com/jeisen/jeisenblog.nsf/...
But now I can't keep up at all. And it's not just because I've aged and slowed down a bit.
On the other hand, the blogger may be showing us his cats to give us the hint that we should... be with cats? =) I've seen too may sites post "cat" filler when there is nothing to post. I would rather they did me the favor of not posting on those days since there is so much else to go through. At least before I go off to play with my cats. Where did I put that camera?
==============
#47
theworkplace.wordpress.com
I better do something inspiring. Personally, the video tour of CERN might do it.
Think yourself lucky - at least when you do this you get the feeling that someone is listening. For me the smalltime blogger I do it and then wonder is anyone listening?
Nige
PS it's currently 3.40am local time !