Posted by Jason Gerry on September 16, 2011
Do You Ever Get To The Point Of Information Overload?
If you’re anything like me your world consists of way too much information whether it’s email, snail mail, work schedules, direct marketing or the new millions of messages that come through social networks to your desktop, laptop, tablet, phone, smart tv, implanted chip etc. every minute, twenty-four hours a day! Here’s the deal – there’s great stuff out there but how do you use it and how do you filter down to the part that is actually relevant and has meaning?
For the world of online at least, I have really started to rely on my reader. Google Reader. There are others out there but I really haven’t had time to try each and every one to evaluate their specific features and benefits. Nor, is this an evaluation of web based news readers.
How I got to this point.
Back in the day (approximately 12 months ago), I would spend hours bookmarking good websites and blogs, then try to remember to check back from time to time to see if there were any updates. If there were, I would review to see if they were interesting or relevant. Then I would read them. That was a time consuming/wasting endeavor. I quit. I hit information overload and it was a time waster. Ok, so I didn’t exactly quit. I stopped the time wasting part. I chose a new way to view the fantastic unedited online content that is so valuable and provides great insight into business and life in general.
Readers give you what you want.
Once you have downloaded your reader you will need to add content. Hopefully, if you were like me, the sites you would visit have an RSS link. Once you have added subscriptions to your reader you no longer need to seek out content, it will be delivered directly to your desktop in a summarized format. You choose what you want to read. You can quickly scan the headings and if of interest, plow right in. Gone are the days of methodically checking sites looking for updates. In addition, my reader will push new feeds to me based on my content consumption and based on overall popularity of the material being published. It makes it incredibly easy to stay up to date. I have a cousin who has been writing a blog for years but until I added it to my reader I had never looked at it. Not to my surprise, it’s a great read – entertaining, interesting, everything that she is – why didn’t I read it sooner? It was lost in the great pile of internet information overload.
This has some big ramifications!
What does this mean to content providers and businesses? The web is changing. In fact I have read numerous blogs about the death of the internet. What does a business need to do in light of this new and dramatically different way of sourcing information? How do you position your corporate site and does it really matter what your “Google ranking” is? One thing is for sure, you’d better have a social presence, a blog feed and hopefully an app moving forward. Experts are forecasting a massive shift to this type of information sourcing over the next 2-5 years. According to recent IDC statistics in Q4 2010, more smartphones were sold than PC’s. That’s blogworthy!
