2005-09-24
Happy Discardia: Feeds [1]
Merlin Mann recently mentioned that these days might be nicely vibed for Happy Discardia, a perfect time for getting rid of stuff, and while I'm actually pretty good at tossing physical items (with some exceptions), I really really suck at getting rid of data I'm harvesting on the web. One area has been bugging me for quite a while, so this might be a chance to attack it: everything RSS.
Now, when it comes to physical stuff, I do have a collector mentality - just to give a figure: I own 2500 LPs (coming down from over 3000 one year ago), or about 1200 books - and that's fine, they are nicely displayed or well containerized, and they don't eat any mental RAM, but with RSS mediated access to information, things just have gone out of control. I'm subscribed to a few hundred feed sources which generate a few thousand new items each day, and I spend a significant time processing those. I also love to check out new tools, gadgets, webapps, and so on, so things are really a mess, since all my feeds are rhizomatically spread around various places, but more on that later.
This is no uncommon phenomenon, of course, many people find themselves overwhelmed with data (think ADD, Information Overload, or Continuous Partial Attention). For me the time is 11:55, so for the next few days, I dedicate this blog to journaling my effords in stepping back to rethink my current behaviour, and to define a decent set of strategies and come up with reasonable practices for dealing with RSS, and to eliminate the rest.
I'll blog the progress as I go, and I have no clue whether this is leading anywhere, so bear with me, but feel free to share any tips you have got, I'll need them.
[rss] [infoeconomy] [superegoblogging] - trackback
Now, when it comes to physical stuff, I do have a collector mentality - just to give a figure: I own 2500 LPs (coming down from over 3000 one year ago), or about 1200 books - and that's fine, they are nicely displayed or well containerized, and they don't eat any mental RAM, but with RSS mediated access to information, things just have gone out of control. I'm subscribed to a few hundred feed sources which generate a few thousand new items each day, and I spend a significant time processing those. I also love to check out new tools, gadgets, webapps, and so on, so things are really a mess, since all my feeds are rhizomatically spread around various places, but more on that later.
This is no uncommon phenomenon, of course, many people find themselves overwhelmed with data (think ADD, Information Overload, or Continuous Partial Attention). For me the time is 11:55, so for the next few days, I dedicate this blog to journaling my effords in stepping back to rethink my current behaviour, and to define a decent set of strategies and come up with reasonable practices for dealing with RSS, and to eliminate the rest.
I'll blog the progress as I go, and I have no clue whether this is leading anywhere, so bear with me, but feel free to share any tips you have got, I'll need them.
[rss] [infoeconomy] [superegoblogging] - trackback
