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February 7, 2004
Overload
I'm a victim of the information age. I suffer from information overload.
Everyday I'm bombarded with tons of information, e-mail, RSS feeds, Television, and on and on. I'm not blaming the various forms of media for my overload, after all, I go looking for it.
I've been looking for tools to help bring the constant barrage of information under control and I've found a few that help.
First, Inboxer sorts out the spam from my e-mail filtering the 200+ messages a day down to 50 or so that I actually want to read and drops some of them of for later review as possible spam. From there, Outlook further filters those 50 or so dropping many of them into folders set up for lists and messages that I'll read at some mysterious "later date" that rarely seems to come along. What's left is usually about 4 messages that get read, responded to and deleted.
Next up is Blogs. Not sure who thought this was a great idea, but it hooked me and I find different folks slant on the news more informative and interesting than major outlets. However, jumping from blog to blog wasted time, especially when they hadn't been updated. Enter Awasu a free RSS reader for windows. RSS readers allow you to "subscribe" to feeds from many blogs (as well as other syndicated feeds like news), the subscription tells the reader which site has new content and what that content is. Depending on the feed, you can either read the full content in Awasu, or at least see enough to know if you want to visit the site. It also keeps track of what you have read, allows searches, and I can keep things for a "later date." This has saved me a lot of time, the only draw back is that it is not able to keep up with LiveJournal Private posts because RSS by nature doesn't "log in".
Finally, I have sites that I like to visit to keep up on Youth Ministry news, TiVo happenings, and other miscellaneous events. It'd be nice if those sites would develop an RSS feed system for their articles, I'd be able to filter though them a bit faster.
In all, the information overload isn't just because I allow to much information to filter my way, it's more to do with the fact that I don't read fast enough or filter well enough. Between that and putting of some listserv messages to a "later date" I think I'll be overloaded for the rest of my life.
Time to go watch TV.
Posted by Jesse at February 7, 2004 10:31 AM