Comments on: Signal vs noise

By: Ron

Ron — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:30:56 +0000

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.

By: 6 Tips to Optimize your RSS Reading Habits | .eduGuru

6 Tips to Optimize your RSS Reading Habits | .eduGuru — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 14:22:30 +0000

[...] This post is also a continuation of Matt Herzberger’s post, Signal vs Noise. [...]

By: Links of the Week (Remix) May 9th, 2008 | .eduGuru

Links of the Week (Remix) May 9th, 2008 | .eduGuru — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:38:36 +0000

[...] So in tribute to the “Friday Five” series let me introduce my special”TGIF Lucky 7“, now with less noise! [...]

By: Bradjward

Bradjward — Thu, 08 May 2008 02:04:45 +0000

@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’.

By: Kyle James

Kyle James — Wed, 07 May 2008 23:11:25 +0000

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. :)

By: Kyle James

Kyle James — Wed, 07 May 2008 23:01:25 +0000

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. :)

By: Jason Falls

Jason Falls — Wed, 07 May 2008 19:50:26 +0000

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.

By: Colin Fast

Colin Fast — Wed, 07 May 2008 17:08:48 +0000

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.

By: Todd

Todd — Wed, 07 May 2008 16:44:00 +0000

@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).

By: Karine Joly

Karine Joly — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:15:21 +0000

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.