Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Information Overload

Hi, my name's Tom and I suffer from Information Overload.

Every day I open up my web browser. The browser currently contains tabs linked to slightly over 100 blogs, newspapers, magazines, and news sites.

On a typical day each of these sites will have a couple of articles worth reading, but call it one article for simplicities sake.

On average each of these articles is around 500 words long.

That's roughly 50 000 words every day.

At the moment I'm also reading Lady of Mazes by Karl Schroeder, and Java for Dummies by Barry Burd.

I have a box of books in my bedroom and another virtual boxload in my Amazon wish list.

I also have a 9:00 - 17:00 job.

Something needs to be done.

But what?

....

RSS feeds have never impressed me. Taking blogs, mulching them up and squeezing them into an email format doesn't appeal.

The challenge then is to find a service or piece of software that combines several blogs together without pissing me off.

I would first have to define exactly what I wanted. This is actually pretty hard.

If anyone has any ideas I'd appreciate them. I haven't thoroughly researched RSS feeds and similar services and if I'm missing something I'd appreciate being told about it.

2 comments:

Shravan Vijayaprasad said...

I'm not a big fan of RSS as well...!!:)

TJ said...

It's not that I wouldn't like a better way of reading news/blogs etc (i.e. less time-consuming) it's that RSS doesn't really offer that much more than simply going to each site.

I'm certain that a system exists where the layout is less like an email inbox and more like a newspaper or magazine: with little boxes containing the recent blog postings.

An opportunity for some programmer there I think.

Look at the front page of The Register for what I'm talking about.

Also google "Sachs Report." That's an interesting digest of news: but it takes far too long to load.