With people barely having a thought we don’t in some way publish to the interweb there’s continuous chatter about information overload. I’ve always been of the opinion that I’d rather have all the information there was, leaving it up to me to pick what I wanted and what to ignore. It’s this that leads me to never ever getting my feed reader down to less than 2000+ unread items (most of these are flickr photos tagged “cat” or various vanity searches for my projects).
So, given that the background noise is of my own making, why would I complain about too much information?
Well I’m not complaining as such, I just think there needs to be a solution to the problem of getting the same information twice from different places. A technical one may do, but I’d rather a sort of moral code.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, with people pushing their blog posts through their tumblr or twitter accounts, or into their Facebook posted items – this is information that I want, but I’ve subscribed to the blog I’ll find it there. It would be fine if the sources were just different ways of receiving the same content, but there’s other unique stuff mixed in – I like my contacts personal tweets, or their randomly tumbl’d web content, so I get the blog posts again. You end up skim reading everything, so I’m sure I miss things I’d like to have known.
I signed up for FriendFeed this week, more to claim my online identity there that through any desire to use it at the moment, but is it just another way to push the same content? ReadWriteWeb listed 35 ways to stream your life, albeit that some of them are rather hazy, I’m just thinking that I’d rather cherry pick what I care about from different people.
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[...] dot com or a smart combination of both. This will make the Google Social Graph API and your information-overloaded friends very happy and reduce my online deja [...]
3 March 2008 @ 8:54 am