Too Much Information

Before I get into the subject of this post, let me note that I will be very busy for the next couple of weeks, and will not be able to post as much as usual. Hopefully I can still get in a couple of posts per week, but we’ll have to see how it goes.

Now to the point of the post: I have too much information, and I bet you do, too. It has to be having an impact on us.

Using feed readers has made it possible for us to plow through hundreds of headlines a day, and delve into specific stories of interest. I am not against feed readers, and in fact I plan to post sometime next week about how to use feed readers. In that post I will even provide a file you can import to your feed reader that will give you 20 or so starter sites if you do not have many feeds yet (or if you have not started using a feed reader).

And, it’s not just feed readers that bring so much information to our faces. There is Twitter and FriendFeed and Facebook and MySpace. And, recently, Guy Kawasaki created Alltop, which makes a huge number of top news source available via one screen. I was initially skeptical of Alltop, but now I use it in addition to my 320 feeds. (I was down to 90 feeds, and Thomas and I exchanged feeds, and now I am trimming again.) It has some great information sources I had not seen before: for example, it snips headlines from management and leadership guru Tom Peters’ blog (and I did not even know he had a blog).

And Twitter, for example, does not contain just fluff information, either: you can find breaking news there before it even hits the news wires, as you can see from the below example of Robert Scoble tweeting about an earthquake in China which occurred just recently:

(source: Scoble’s Twitter feed)

Zoli Erdos just noted this a little while in his blog, so the information is now spreading quickly. (Fox News now has a breaking news piece on it, and of course we will hear more later.)

In fact, it was through a couple of Steve Rubel’s tweets of this evening that I decided to write this post. He tweeted about an article at LifeStream that talks about people not commenting on blogs much anymore, partly because of being so swamped with information. He also pointed to a ReadWriteWeb article that had a somewhat similar message (slightly different). Those of you who also blog will find these two articles to be very interesting, when you get a chance to read them.

So, I don’t want to give up Twitter. It’s great for information sharing, and it’s fun for just chatting with friends. I don’t want to give up FriendFeed, either. I do want to give up a bunch of feeds, and I will work on doing dumping the ones that really do not give me anything useful on a regular basis.

Anyway, back to all this information we are all bombarded with: Does it somehow change us for the worse, for the better, both, or neither?

Let’s use me for an example. I have always been a sort of restless soul, always needing to feel like I am busy at something. (I have learned to take naps since I’ve retired, though … highly recommended.) But, I feel like all the information sources I consume are making me even more restless. Even if I am setting on the couch reading a book (more information), I still use my BlackBerry Curve or iPod Touch every 10 or 15 minutes to check Twitter and Gmail, and sometimes even Google Reader.

Well the world is not going to come to an end because I do that, but I feel like I have gotten to the point where I have some uneasiness if I am not “keeping up with it all.” The rational side of me knows this is nonsense, but the side of me that now craves information keeps on going.

I need to do something to get more control of it, instead of being controlled by it.

Anyway, that’s my two cents on living in the information age. How’s about sharing your thoughts on it?

And, one more time, as a reminder: expect a reduced blogging frequency for a couple of weeks. (We probably both need the break anyway, huh? )