Wednesday, May 7th, 2008...May 7, 2008
Signal vs noise
Signal vs noise is been something I have been thinking about a lot lately. The web with the transformation of web 2.0 has become a attention economy. The strive for the 15 mins of web fame. I have started to reach a point of information overload in the last few weeks. We all sub RSS feeds, have twitter and various other sources of info. But I have always overdone it. Here are a few tips I got in an article on Social Media Explorer:
- Reassess Every Feed
- Separate personal and professional reading
- Combine And Filter Feeds Using Yahoo Pipes and AideRSS
Kind of funny since I do the first two and have been looking into the third.
Twitter
I have been trying to cut back. I follow 275 which I cut from approx 500. It was a struggle to follow that flow of information. I used to try to backtrack each time I hit my computer but I no longer do.
There are some twitter users that have near 20,000 posts, I have to assume there is a good deal of noise in there. There are others who just follow thousands of people with the hope that people follow them back. There are people with nothing useful to say, bands I don’t care about, businesses that are just blowing there own horn. Oh yeah I know of a site like this, it’s called MySpace and it sucks. So I am making an attempt to cut it down to my influencers/inspiration and people I talk to on a regular basis. I know this is something others have done, Nate Ritter cut a ton of users in his mass exodus.
RSS Feeds
I currently follow 377 feeds which was cut from near 600 at some point. My criteria for post I read now is short, bulleted and skim-able if I find it interesting I then read it. There were way to make sites that I follow that produces near 30 posts a day. I can’t keep up. An example of this are sites like Mashable and TechCrunch. Push came to shove I choose TechCrunch. I have been looking into some kind of a filtering tools such as AideRss or Yahoo Pipes as I mentioned above to clean out the crap. I even saw someone write the other day about using FriendFeed as their feed reader which seemed interesting.
Now I know there are people that read far more stuff than me. But my questions is how and why? So many blogs out there now just repost stories from other sites. I mean whatever big story TechCrunch runs will be inevitably be repost hundreds of times. Now I don’t want to act as though I have not be guilty of this nor will I not do it again in the future. Just something to think about in both your personal professional life.
I suppose the goal is not to become one of these, so think before you publish that next post…
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12 Comments
May 7th, 2008 at May 7, 2008
Good thoughts. We refined our posting criteria at SquaredPeg a few weeks ago to avoid new media douchebagginess, and it’s worked well. I was falling into the trap of posting stories that were already elsewhere on the web, which all of us have fallen into at some point.
There seems to be a want in bloggers to post information first, be the first to break a story, etc. We have decided to go back to where we started, posting what we know and what we’re doing, and we’re seeing more comments and engagement through it. It took a fellow co-worker to slap some sense into me after I posted about Flickr Video. :)
As far as Twitter/RSS, I try to stick around 100 twitter followers and less than 300 RSS feeds. That keeps me plenty busy. Now that the winter is over, it’s time to come out of internet hibernation and enjoy the weather, which means following less on the internet.
May 7th, 2008 at May 7, 2008
Brad,
Excellent points. I need to work on this myself. Social networking can suck the life out of you.
BTW, I will repost this article on my blog.. just kidding :)
Shrop
May 7th, 2008 at May 7, 2008
So, I’m not alone suffering from a real bad case of information overload…
A few weeks ago, it came to the point where I just had to unplug to get some work done. I always wonder how uber active people on the social media scene managed to do any work done.
I’ll check out RSSaide.
Thanks for sharing.
May 7th, 2008 at May 7, 2008
@Bradjward - Internet hibernation — nice! Would be interesting to find out how Web habits differ between people living in cold vs warm areas (WI vs. FL).
May 7th, 2008 at May 7, 2008
Something I’ve tried with both Mashable and ReadWriteWeb is subscribing to their daily newsletter within my blog reader. Skimming through one long combined post daily seems like less of a burden than 15 or 20 separate posts. I suppose this is the poor man’s version of combining feeds with Yahoo Pipes.
I tried AideRSS, but it’s not for me. I don’t trust their “formula” for filtering what I should read. I’d rather find a human filter that I trust instead.
May 7th, 2008 at May 7, 2008
Thanks for the mention. No doubt inflow management is becoming a skill we all need with today’s web environment. Filtering and managing the number of sources is a headache, but a necessary one. One suggestion I might offer is that TechMeme.com does a good job of bringing only the most active posts from many tech sites, including TechCrunch, to light. I still don’t want to miss some of the lesser posts on those sites, but it’s worth checking out.
May 7th, 2008 at May 7, 2008
So funny… I wrote a very similar post this weekend just haven’t posted it yet. lol I almost posted it this morning, but decided to go with the Firefox add-on one instead. That would have been a little funny for both us to have an overload post along with the one on ReadWriteWeb about People just skimming content/.
Just goes to prove the point that so very few content is original or not just something rewritten from another person’s perspective. I guess I’ll hold it off for next week to kind of keep the conversation running. :)
May 7th, 2008 at May 7, 2008
And to answer the noise question I definitely only try to post well thought out posts and if some news comes up during the week then I just wait until my weekly links post to suck all the other little tidbits until then. Brad that’s something you might consider for breaking news. I mean even waiting until the end of the week you will still report it before Campus Technology or the Chronicle Wired Campus Blog, if it’s something they would even cover. ReadWriteWeb has 211K RSS subscribers, TechCrunch is at 884K, and Mashable at 171K so if it’s covered on one or more of those networks most likely all your subscribers are all over it. :)
May 7th, 2008 at May 7, 2008
@Todd - definitely. I nominate myself to move to Florida for a year. I promise to report back, haha.
@Kyle - I usually try to throw a higher ed twist on it (like with YouTube Stats, etc.) but still, the information is all out there. I think @cfast had a good tweet awhile back about not needing everyone to repost a link from mashable/RWW/etc b/c he had already seen it multiple times.
I like to check AideRSS to see how our posts are doing in terms of engagement (comments, del.icio.us, etc) but like Colin I wouldn’t trust it to do the filtering for me.
Even Kyle’s comment about having a post about this topic in queue plays in to it. We were considering a post last week on a similar thought to this about our refining/redefining SquaredPeg posts, but we figured we’d just roll with it . I hear all the time “you beat me too it” “I was going to blog about that” “I was going to post that link”, etc. And I’ve said it myself. I think that if we are all putting our own thoughts into it, that shouldn’t be an issue because content will differ. However, simply reposting a link (i.e. look at what this kid did with Twitter to get out of jail!) plays straight into the noise column.
It seems like a lot of people are trying to cut back on their ‘noise pollution’.
May 9th, 2008 at May 9, 2008
[...] So in tribute to the “Friday Five” series let me introduce my special”TGIF Lucky 7“, now with less noise! [...]
June 2nd, 2008 at June 2, 2008
[...] This post is also a continuation of Matt Herzberger’s post, Signal vs Noise. [...]
July 2nd, 2008 at July 2, 2008
Yeah, late to the party…
In some ways, I’m really glad that I’m not as tapped into a lot of the new things that cropped up. As “new school” as I like to think of myself, I’m still just an old soul in a youngish body.
I’ve even taken a facebook break, because I want to focus more on “doing stuff” and less on networking and getting caught up in the noise.
We’ll see how long I can hold out, tho.
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