Following on from a comment RC made in one of my threads, how do you organise and consume the information that matters most to you?
I was thinking about it last night, that I have chaotic method of RSS feeds in Google Reader, bookmarks, emails, twitter, facebook (that's more personal) and forums I browse.
Is that how you guys do it, or am I missing a trick?
Be interested in how others do it and stop getting overloaded with infoblindness.
Total chaos. Same as you, lots of different ways - mostly twitter, facebook, forums and newsletters.
Chaos here too. I graze in lots of places, but forums tend to be the best source of information that's actually useful.
I've been unsubscribing from a lot of things that are merely interesting, and trying to focus on info that's actionable.
>> chaos
it might seem like chaos to an outsider, but when you add bookmarks before you use RSS, forums before blogs, feeds before Twitter, etc. you grow up with these different channels and instinctively know how to use them.
Email for me is the biggest time drain / inconvenience
>>unsubscribing
4 of every 5 (non spam) marketing emails I get I hit the unsubscribe button these days.
Chaos mostly, although At one point I arranged my RSS feeds into folders in a halfhearted attempt at organization.
Zite apps have been surprisingly good at drawing my attention to news articles I might have missed.
Twitter is chaos, but there is some interesting info that floats out of there.
I just don't have time for push info, I still just pull it when I want or need it.
More chaos.
I've laid off twitter for a bit, as I was just getting information overload. Have tried to organise things in RSS, have tried using services like springpad, evernote and diigo to organise things. End result is still chaos.
I'm not sure I am really even consuming much... more grazing from a buffet. Some days it's more like just having the buffet thrown at me.
about 50% search engine, 20% messenger, 15% forum, 10% news sites
I think my memory retention is roughly in the same order for those things. the SE & messenger stuff is almost always 'need to know' or just purely conversational, I tend to use the latter two as a distraction from real (key pressing) work.
No push. All pull.
I run a very curated browser list. I can work from bookmarks but now I prefer Quickstarter/SpeedDial style browser launch pages. I set up different machines with slightly different launch pages based on where I typically use them during the day.
I try to keep my sources to about 20 sites. Preference is given to those that readily refer to the original source site. Page format is a consideration, too. Some are just too hard to read and keep mental track of what I've seen lately.
I arrange the Speed dial icons by topic and frequency of use. If a site starts to fail me, and many sites do shift their content, reporting, and editorial style over time, I start looking for a replacement. Moving away is a serious matter and that's where the largest amount of curating takes place.
40% Speed-dial/Bookmarks, 20% Forums, 40% RSS
I've been heading back to RSS more recently. I have a massive OPML file with thousands of sites, but I never open most of the individual feeds. I use FeedDemon to run Watches on all the feeds, and it pulls up the relevant info for me for most topics based on keywords. I can run most of my Google Alerts and other SE search queries as RSS feeds and be alerted that way.