PR guru Steve Rubel has an interesting video clip on his Micro Persuasion blog about how to deal with information overload. It’s a real issue — both as a journalist and just as a web user, I’m trying to keep up with Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, MySpace (for my band), several e-mail accounts, IMs, and a ridiculous number of RSS feeds against which I’m fighting a losing battle.
It’s literally impossible to keep up with everything. It can’t be done. So how do you pick out the good stuff? Rubel shares some good tips in that video, but I think the key might just be serendipitous search, a buzzword that’s become popular with the rise of serendipitous search engines like StumbleUpon. Basically, serendipity in that context means trusting StumbleUpon to point you to Web content that you’ll like, which it generally does very well.
Serendipity in my context means 1) Understanding that I can’t read, see, or write about everything; and 2) trusting my various feeds, my judgment, and my friends to float the good stuff to the top for me. For instance, I’m way behind on reading my RSS feeds. Rubel’s post is sitting in my RSS reader right now, but I’m too behind to have seen it there. But he also posted it on FriendFeed, where, because he’s a friend of a friend, it popped up on my page and I found it. I’m not following him on Twitter, but if I were I could have found it there, too, I’m sure.
Another example: This morning, I deleted an important press release from my inbox before reading it. Luckily, a friend IMed me asking for some info from the release, which I tracked down and read. Turns out it was a product announcement that was important enough that I added the related news article to the PCMag.com homepage.
For every story like these, I’m sure there are plenty in which serendipity fails me and I don’t get info I could have really used. But that’s why the understanding that I can’t read everything is so important. It’s the only way I can deal with the massive flow of info without losing my mind.
