connecting with information and finding your community

During the panel discussion after Us Now at the CSPS, there was a good question about "keeping up" - how to manage the overwhelming information available on the net.

Mike gave a quite correct suggestion about using a feed reader rather than trying to read blog-by-blog, and in the spirit of community engagement I also answered the question myself (I wasn't on the panel, I was standing in the audience at the mike waiting to ask a question).

What I said in my answer is: find the community of people who are interested in what you're interested in, and the information will come to you.

This is much easier said than done, so I want to expand on it.

There is a pattern of Internet engagement that goes something like:

1. tentative steps
2. discover there is interesting information out there
3. discover there is A LOT of interesting information out there
4. try to manage it in various ways (selecting just a few blogs to read, or going beyond that to use a feed reader)
5. getting overwhelmed

I went through all of these stages.  For several years I followed many blogs in Bloglines, in part because the community I was following at the time was library bloggers, and there was a very active cross-blog discussion going on.

But then the Bloglines "unread" start to pile up... 100... 1000... 5000.  Everyone has their information overload breaking point.

A lot of people just abandon the whole exercise at this point, perhaps periodically dipping in to read a couple posts and then "mark all as read".

Can you get to Bloglines zero?  I'm not sure... but I'm not sure you should be trying to.

Because in a way that entire model of engagement is about interacting with information directly, rather than interacting with people.  Isn't it the people you're interested in?  Social media isn't about the media, it's about the social.  So what I recommend is, use your information gathering tools not to find information, but to find interesting people.

Find your community.  Maybe they're all still in listservs, maybe they're all in Facebook, whatever.
If you can find them, you may discover that instead of a labourious pull process, where you have to try to pull huge amounts of information into your head for filtering, you can be part of a natural information flow.

To be honest, I almost never look at Bloglines.  Instead, I use lightweight social tools (mostly bookmarking) to share items of interest with my community.  And interesting items from them just appear in my environment (FriendFeed mostly, and Twitter a bit).  My default is to share, their default is to share, and collectively we discover and discuss interesting items.

This is a really old idea that has nothing to do with technology.
We used to call it the Salon, today we might call it a Foo Camp - you discover interesting people and then you find ways to get them all together.

And indeed, you may find the best way for you to gather new information is to go to a local meetup, not stare at FriendFeed.  Or (as is my experience) you may go from Twitter to discovering offline events (the "tweetup") and then back online to discuss them afterwards.

And this is not necessarily about you going out with some kind of cyberscythe and trying to harvest information or contacts.  (NOTE TO MARKETERS: Do not try to harvest us, it just annoys people.)  If you share interesting content - perhaps bookmarks and Tweets to start, and then blog postings when you have some longer-form thoughts to share - interesting people will find you.

The most powerful interactions I've had online and connecting online to offline were not because I set out with the intention to make contact - it was because I shared - I shared info about TCP/IP ports on my personal web site starting over a decade ago not to build some media empire, but because I wanted the information online so that *I* could find it, and because the barrier was low enough that it didn't make any sense to me to NOT share it for others to use.  I shared conference notes in my work blog not to attract library community attention, but because I wanted to be able to use the power of google over my own notes for my own purposes - I never imagined it would grow into this blog and the incredible connections that have resulted.

So don't get tied up in technical details like RSS or whatever.  Be open.  Find interesting people.  Share, always share.  Interesting people will find you.  And then discuss.  No information overload - just conversation.  We've been having conversations for thousands of years, we're pretty good at it.

Comments

[David Hume]

Nice post, Richard! Really great suggestions--I've been a bloglines user for a while now but find myself using it less and less. Twitter is pretty compelling for 'info finds you' reason, which hadn't crystalized in my mind until reading the above.

Anyway, thanks for the insight, and thanks for coming to the panel today. It was great to see you...

[Mike Kujawski]

Excellent point Richard. I would have elaborated more on filtering however we had to move on in the interest of time. A great tool I use to overcome the 1000 unread items dilemma in Google Reader is a plugin for Firefox called PostRank (www.postrank.com). Give it a try, it sorts posts based on engagement levels (Best, Great, Good,). Not perfect, but useful.

MK