Scobleizer - Latest Comments in How do we keep up?

Re: How do we keep up?

monkeyleader — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 04:37:41 -0000

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?

Nige

PS it's currently 3.40am local time !

Re: How do we keep up?

Robert Scoble — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 21:29:18 -0000

Ali: that's a great way to clean out feeds.

I better do something inspiring. Personally, the video tour of CERN might do it.

Re: How do we keep up?

Ali — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 21:16:01 -0000

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 :-)

Re: How do we keep up?

47project — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 17:07:04 -0000

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.

==============
#47
theworkplace.wordpress.com

Re: How do we keep up?

shokk — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 15:07:36 -0000

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?

Re: How do we keep up?

Curt Monash — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 14:27:13 -0000

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.

Re: How do we keep up?

Henri — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 13:37:06 -0000

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.

Re: How do we keep up?

jc — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 12:48:04 -0000

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.

Re: How do we keep up?

John Lance — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 10:41:53 -0000

That was supposed to be "Notes 8" not an 8) (that'll teach me to put an 8 next to a parenthesis)

Re: How do we keep up?

John Lance — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 10:40:03 -0000

RE: Offline Feedreaders

The next version of Lotus Notes (Notes 8) will have a feed reader with offline abilities.
http://www.jeffeisen.com/je...

Re: How do we keep up?

Fred — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 09:41:19 -0000

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.

Re: How do we keep up?

francine — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 08:24:57 -0000

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.

Re: How do we keep up?

RexDixon — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 07:04:05 -0000

How? Very carefully. Less sleep, more research!

Rex

Re: How do we keep up?

Joshua Kaufman — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 06:22:21 -0000

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/archiv...

Re: How do we keep up?

Carl Rahn Griffith — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 05:36:12 -0000

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.

Re: How do we keep up?

danja — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 04:28:13 -0000

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).

Re: How do we keep up?

Thomas Hawk — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 02:46:25 -0000

Did somebody say cats?

http://thomashawk.com/2007/...

Re: How do we keep up?

Hart — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 00:43:02 -0000

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 ☺

Re: How do we keep up?

Zaine Ridling — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 00:28:59 -0000

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.

Re: How do we keep up?

Peter — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 22:40:03 -0000

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.

Re: How do we keep up?

Nicholas Ampazis — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 21:04:07 -0000

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.

Re: How do we keep up?

JoeDuck — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 20:19:15 -0000

Just give up, relax, and wait for the computers to take over in 2020. (do stock up on pretzels and beer tho)

Re: How do we keep up?

Diego — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 17:39:04 -0000

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.

Re: How do we keep up?

Stu — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 17:34:32 -0000

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.

Re: How do we keep up?

Anonymous — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 17:32:46 -0000

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 :(