Information overload

Recently I have noticed I spend more and more time reading various news flowing down from around thew world over the Internet. Too much time. I have about 30 RSS feeds I have been reading regularly. This is a lot, but bearable, as long as you sit at the computer all day. But when the daily amount of messages started exceeding 200 and I was on the road, trying to catch up in the evening, I decided to do something about this.

The decision what to cut is always tough. But after considering all pros and cons, I cut the most busy feeds. The ones generating more than ten messages a day. I feel much better now and I do not have a sense I miss something. Todany the information sources, especially the popular ones, are redundant. When something important gets posted on, say, engadget.com, it is soon retweeted or reposted somewhere else. So good bye Engadget, good bye Slashdot, good bye Ars Technica, and good bye Wired. Ditto LinkedIn. I am no longer interested somebody of my 200+ contacts changed a job or was recommended by a colleague.

I hope Google hears the call. We need better tools to filter what is really relevant to us. Otherwise we will drown in the information flood. Why in the Google Reader we don't have "More like this " and "Less like this" buttons, heloping us filter out spam and unwanted information from the subscribed feeds? This will come, but for the time being my rule of a thumb becomes: you publish more than ten news a day, I cut you out. The same applies to Twitter. Next week I will be pruning people I follow. Two, three, may be five tweets a day I can handle. More than ten I consider noise. You have been warned :)