Gist is not a system for the casual email user whose main communications involve sending email forwards to friends and pictures of the kids to mom and dad. Instead, Gist is designed to help the professional email user who often opens up their inbox only to feel like it's helplessly out of control. How do you know what the most important communications are? How can you stay up on what your email contacts are doing? Gist aims to solve these problems.

Through ongoing analysis of your email, Gist determines what's important based on the frequency and types of communications that occur. It then provides you with the following: profiles, insights, and actions. Profiles include both individual and company profiles, insights are the relevant information about your most important contacts, and actions are the ability to share news and contact details using the online service.

When you're signed into Gist, you're presented with a dashboard where boxes display key information like your top emailed contacts, news about those contacts, upcoming events, email attachments, and links. All this information is automatically retrieved from your inbox with no effort on your part. It's as if your email inbox serves as the backend database for this unique relationship management system.

Tabs at the top of the page let you move from the dashboard to sections where you can focus on People or Companies specifically, organizing them into groups, tagging them (a new feature), removing those you don't need to track, managing their importance levels via sliders, editing them, and much more. You can also click to view individual contacts and companies and edit the data there if need be.

New Features

One of the new features included in this updated public version of Gist is the ability to pull in contacts from Salesforce. This is a helpful addition to the program which also supports Gmail, Outlook, general Email/IMAP accounts, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. You can import your own CSV file, too.

With additional software, Gist can be integrated right into Outlook and Salesforce. The Outlook integration is done via a plugin which pops up a separate window where you can access info on people, companies, events, messages, and attachments. The plugin was available previously, but has been updated in the new version. The company decided to go with a pop-up type of plugin for a few reasons. For one, by not implementing it as an email sidebar (like Xobni does, for instance), Gist data can be accessed from any screen in Outlook whether that's your inbox itself, a contact's details page, a meeting request form, etc. They also made the plugin work more like a mini-browser so it could perform its actions quickly while not slowing down Outlook in the process.

Also new today is Gist's integration with Salesforce. Not only can you pull data into Gist via the CRM system, you can now set up a Gist widget of sorts that displays right in Salesforce itself. Here, you can stay current on news, blogs, tweets, and other relevant information from your Salesforce contacts.

Integration with Twitter and the ability to share via Twitter and Facebook round out the new features in this latest beta build. Since many business folks can't be bothered to friend and follow their contacts on Twitter, Gist does it for you. It doesn't actually follow users on your behalf in your own Twitter account, but it pulls in their tweets from their publicly available timelines right into Gist. You can then respond or share information via Twitter or Facebook - an important step in managing and maintaining communications in today's tech savvy business world. You can still share items via email or flag them for later, as you could with previous Gist versions, too.

For now Gist remains a free service, though a more advanced paid version is in the works for the future. Gist is also working on their mobile offerings but have nothing to announce as far as specialized mobile applications just yet. New users can sign up for Gist now here: www.gist.com

Yesterday's study about Facebook's impact on GPA scores was not a conclusive, comprehensive report. Instead, it was simply a set of preliminary discoveries that Ohio State researcher Aryn Karpinski said could be looked into deeper. In fact, she asserts that most media reports overstate her findings - she just found a connection and more should be done to study the matter. "What I found is so exploratory -- people need to chill out," she was quoted as saying.

But right on the heels of that news - exploratory or not - comes another report that may even be more damaging: social media could lead to amorality. At least that appears to be the overall takeaway from this new report.

In this case, a study from a neuroscience group led by Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, suggests that our digital media culture may lend itself better to some mental processes than others. And the ones it doesn't lend itself that well to? You guessed it: moral decision-making.

No Time for Reflection

According to first author Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, "for some kinds of thought, especially moral decision-making about other people's social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection." Unfortunately, in our "real-time" web of information flow, some things happen too fast for us to process. This leads to us never being able to fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states. "That would have implications for your morality," said Immordino-Yang.

During the study, the researchers shared compelling, real-life stories with volunteers to induce emotions like admiration for virtue or skill or compassion for physical or social pain. Brain imaging scans showed the volunteers needed six to eight seconds to fully respond to stories of pain. Of course, when it comes to the rapid stream of news from TV, online feeds, Twitter, and definitely the new real-time interface of Friendfeed, 6 to 8 seconds could feel like an eternity - and a period in which a million new items floated past our field of vision.

We have the ability to sort this flowing information quickly, but developing deeper feelings - the social emotions that define humanity - takes much longer. And who has the time?

Fear-Mongering about Digital Media, Take 3?

Media scholar Manuel Castells, holder of the Wallis Anneberg Chair of Communication Technology and Society at USC went on to further interpret the findings saying, "in a media culture in which violence and suffering becomes an endless show, be it in fiction or in infotainment, indifference to the vision of human suffering gradually sets in."

We can't help but feel we've heard similar strains of this same argument before. Doesn't it remind you of that old saying "TV will rot your brain?" Or maybe it's a throwback to the worrisome findings from the past decade about how violent video games supposedly lead to actual violence. It seems that our society is always concerned about how digital media will impact our humanity. And there's always a way to show that it has negative effects.

But is digital media really that bad? We think not. Maybe we can't properly feel the correct amount of compassion or pain when watching the Twitter stream update in TweetDeck, but is the Twitter stream really the place to go to experience these emotions anyway?

Case in point, watching the tweets about the Hudson River plane crash was exciting in the sense that we were getting the news first, all fresh, raw, and unprocessed. But it wasn't until later, watching TV interviews with the survivors telling their stories and speaking of the pilot's heroism that the emotions really kicked in. Is that not OK for some reason?

It seems to us that what should matter to humanity is that we do, in fact, still feel things...even if we might not feel them right away from a tweet.

There's really not much to the disstill web application, but that's okay with us. This is definitely an example of how the simplest web apps can be the most useful in the end.

The only thing on the disstill web page is a little slider bar that lets you filter Digg.com stories based on a minimum number of diggs. You just drag the slider to adjust the number of diggs that stories need to have in order to be included in the RSS feed. The low end of the slider is set to 100 diggs and the high end is 5000. Obviously, the higher you go, the more filtered the feed becomes and the more likely you're only going to see the really, really hot stories.

Once you have the slider set, you can either view the page or click "get the RSS feed" to add the customized feed to your preferred feed reader. It's a lot easier than using Yahoo Pipes, that's for sure!

A Couple of Suggestions

Our only complaint about this nifty little web app is that it doesn't let you choose which section the stories come from (Politics, Technology, Science, Gaming, etc.). Instead, it looks at the entire Digg website. We would also love to filter for images and videos, too. Perhaps in some future version, we hope?

At any rate, this is one of those little tools that can end up making your life a little less info-overloaded. And for that, we thank you, Mr. Alex Rabarts. (P.S. Can you build a generic version of this that lets you enter in any URL and then filter by PostRank? That would be amazing!)

Alex also created a nice visualization of Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Hacker News, and Yahoo Buzz that's worth a look. Check it out at oursignal.com.

Ambient News is a new Firefox add-on written by Mozilla developer Atul Varma and is currently available as an alpha release. The add-on tracks your browsing habits, learning which sites you visit most frequently. It then pulls the headlines in from those sites and displays them for you in a beautifully fading list every time you open a new tab in Firefox. If you see something that interests you, just click the link and you'll be taken to the web site where the headline originated. Privacy advocates, rest assured - no data is shared outside your browser.

Intelligent Agents to the Rescue!

As Michael Calore of Wired notes, the add-on is a great workaround for the biggest usability problem facing RSS. "Many people don't know what it is or how to take advantage of it," he writes. "The first hint that a feed exists is a funky orange or blue icon. Click on it and, in most cases, you get prompted to load another application. Sometimes, you just see ugly, raw XML output."

But since we're mostly web geeks here at ReadWriteWeb, we're more enthralled with another aspect to this tool: its intelligence. As we mentioned not too long ago, cloud agents are on the rise. The term, coined by blogger Chris Arkenberg, refers to automated agents that help us better deal with the volumes of data we have to sort through every day. Although Ambient News isn't necessary a full-on cloud agent - it doesn't actually work in the cloud - it can still certainly be considered an agent, especially since it helps us sort through a barrage of information in a new way.

Other Alternatives

Ambient News is not the only alternative to the traditional RSS Reader. Over the past year at ReadWriteWeb, we've also made mention of other alternative news readers like Feedly, which puts a magazine-style interface on top of Google Reader. Another popular RSS reader is Snackr, an Adobe AIR app that scrolls headlines across your screen like a news ticker. Then there is, of course, FriendFeed, a lifestreaming application that's quickly becoming an alternative way to share information among the early adopter set.

Alternative RSS readers aren't for everyone, though - journalists, bloggers, researchers, and the like may still need to use a jam-packed feed reader in order to seek out the elusive info they seek on a regular basis. But for those of you who are more casual web surfers and blog readers, alternative RSS readers are a less stressful way to get your news without the news getting to you.

Given the current economy, there may be fewer applications and services to try next year. Whatever will we early adopters do? We love to flit from service to service, trying the latest shiny new thing, endlessly discussing whether or not it will stick, whether it will "cross the chasm." Without the endless barrage of new services being released one after another, in 2009 we may find ourselves having to more deeply embrace the ones we have left. More importantly, we'll finally have the time to figure out how we can really integrate them (or not) into our daily lives.

As we discover how to better manage the social media apps we added to our daily workflow during 2008, we may end up turning a more critical eye towards any newcomers in 2009. Enriched with a better understanding that doesn't come just from being enamored of "shininess," but from experiences that grew over time, we may question the new arrivals in ways we never did before. What value does this bring me?, we'll ask. Is this really doing anything new?

Thankfully, the answer to that last one will likely be "yes," as the funding possibilities for straight up clones of popular services will probably be dialed back in 2009.

What We Want in 2009: Help Us Manage Social Media Better

For the entrepreneurs still looking to get our attention with the latest social media toys, their pitch may no longer be "come try this, it's new," but instead, "come try this, it helps." Because if there's anything we learned from 2008, it's that social media overload is not sustainable.

Over the course of the past year, we found ourselves drawn to the apps, services, and features that helped us better organize the madness that is information overload. We added our friends to lists in both FriendFeed and Tweet Deck, we categorized our RSS feeds and even cleared out some for good, we de-friended the strangers we had collected on Facebook, we synced our social network friend lists, and we found ways to multi-post to our preferred networks. Yes, we became more efficient..but there's still so much room for improvement.

Our Social Media Wish List

Perhaps next year, we'll see more apps that help us better organize, if not filter, the information we deal with every day. We have some thoughts about what we would like to see and we hope that 2009 will bring these ideas to fruition.

• Google Reader add-ins and/or Greasemonkey scripts:We want Labs for Google Reader! It seems Google is more interested in revamping the Reader UI than giving us any real tools to deal with our RSS overload. If they won't help, then someone else should. We would love to see tools that let us view our feeds based on our attention data, without having to manually reorganize the feeds ourselves. We also want duplicates marked as read - if we read a friend's shared item from a feed we subscribe to, why do we have to see it again as we plow through our unread feeds? Finally, we need tools that let us better filter our subscriptions to reduce noise. Why can't we click a button to hide all the posts where someone has spliced in their delicious links or Twitter updates, for example?
• Auto-categorization tools: We tried to emulate Robert Scoble and what did we end up with? Only several thousand friends whose updates fly by at the speed of light. We tried to organize them into lists, but do you know how long that takes?! What would we would like to see are tools that organize people for you. Is it really so hard? The tools could parse our friends' Twitter profiles, for example, to categorize people based on location, business, or company. All the local people could be in one list. Everyone whose profile says "SEO" in another. Anyone in the top 50 or 100 users (based on followers/friends) in a third list called "noteworthy." Just because we want to customize and personalize our lists doesn't mean we couldn't use a little help getting started with the task.
• More Friend Synchronization tools: We want to friend you - really we do - but it's hard because you're here and there and everywhere. To make matters worse, you don't even use the same username on Digg as you do on Twitter. How will we ever find you? What we want is a tool that allows us to friend people, with one click on all the networks we possibly can, according to our preferences. It should also be able to delve into our social graph and sync up the friends we have already added.
• Friend List Sanitizers: OK, we followed/friended you, but we don't know why. We don't know you, we don't have any friends in common, in fact, we think you might have requested our friendship by mistake. So why are you still in our Facebook friends list? We need tools that help us clean up our lists to remove the accidental "stranger friendings" left over from our MySpace days. Even better, the tool could compare our Facebook list to our FriendFeed or Twitter friends to see if we know you elsewhere in order to determine whether to retain or remove the friendship.

These are just a few social media tools we would like to see developed in 2009. What are yours?

AwayFind is a clever solution to the email overload problem. It lets you step away from your email without missing the most important messages - the so-called "email emergencies." That addresses one of people's deep-seated fears of email abandonment - the fear that some piece of critical information is going to arrive and we're not going to see it.

Basically, AwayFind is an auto-responder on steroids. You can configure its outgoing message to your liking. That message includes a link which allows people to get your attention if they are, in fact, emailing you about something urgent.

Your message could read, for example:

But What If It's Important?

Those who really needed to reach you can click the link to be taken to a web page where they can fill out a quick form, the results of which will be sent to you.

The form is not too cumbersome to fill out, but it has just enough fields to cause people to pause and consider whether or not it's really worth their effort. It also includes a CAPTCHA at the bottom to keep the spammers at bay. The form can be configured so that messages are categorized by the sender via a drop-down box (e.g. "Personal," "Business", etc.) and then those messages can be auto-routed to the appropriate person(s). In other words, AwayFind can automatically delegate your email for others to deal with.

When someone fills out the form, you're alerted based on the settings you chose during AwayFind's setup and configuration. You can receive a text message (SMS) or you can specify to be alerted at a different email account - that secret address you created for emergencies only. You can also check AwayFind's online inbox via the web.

With AwayFind, you can finally enjoy that vacation, to be sure, but you can also set up day-to-day templates to manage the everyday onslaught.

Pricing Info

The AwayFind service comes in two pricing tiers - a free version and a Professional version. The upgraded plan is $4.95/mo or $34.95/year and comes with a few extra features like a branding option which incorporates your logo, SSL security, integration with your web site, international SMS support, and more. It works with Gmail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail/Windows Live Mail, Outlook, and others.

Now that you have all that extra time on your hands, you should probably read AwayFind's guide to not checking email (provided for free upon registration), as it will help you stick with your new plan. Remember, breaking email addiction is something we have to fight one day at a time.

When managing your reading list through the bookmarklet, you now have more options as well. You can view your list as either "normal" or "condensed," select how many items to show per page, open the list in the sidebar, and enable or disable various context menus and additional toolbar buttons.

However, the best feature to come to your reading list is the ability to sort it by PostRank. This functionality, formerly called AideRSS, is something we've been big fans of here at RWW for some time. With PostRank enabled, your reading list is intelligently filtered by popularity. Posts are scored in several ways, including number of comments it received, number of times it's been tagged in Del.icio.us, number of diggs, and how many inbound links it has received. So now, you can read your list in order of importance, an especially useful feature for those suffering from information overload.

Other improvements like updated privacy controls and tweaks to existing features round out this latest release, making Read It Later a great addition to your browser whether that's Firefox or IE. Now all we need is an iPhone bookmarklet and we'll be all set.

Gist, whose slogan is "where your inbox meets the web," essentially turns your email inbox into a more structured application filled with information while prioritizing the emails that are of the most importance to you. To get started, you connect Gist with your Gmail account. You can also upload a .csv file from either Outlook or LinkedIn. The application then organizes your email and the data extracted from your inbox into a dashboard which gives you a brief overview of the most important items.

The Dashboard & People Pages

On the Gist dashboard, you'll see lists of recent attachments and recent links in the sidebar, high-priority emails in the middle, and important people on the left. Those people are ranked by you using the service's rating slider which gives you granular control over the order in which those names are displayed. When you click on any person listed, you'll see a "people page" that highlights your recent correspondence as well as recent links and attachments, just like the dashboard homepage does.

The People Pages in Gist aren't just snapshots of inbox activity. They also incorporate other information like news about that person and/or their company. That news comes from a number of sources from across the web, like Yahoo News for example, as well as from recent blog posts. With that information on hand, you have an opening to reach out to them be it to congratulate them on their impressive launch or to simply say how much you enjoyed their recent blog post.

Got The Gist?

We've addressed some of the problems with information overload in the past - detailing both the problem and some possible solutions. For email specifically, we looked at five ways to deal with email overload, which focuses on methods like GTD vs. folders and rules. We even looked into some of the applications highlighted at the first IORG (Information Overload Research Group) conference, an event held by the new research group whose founders include IBM, Microsoft, Google, Intel, and others. Unfortunately, no one application has effectively solved the problem just yet.

In a way, Gist reminds us a bit of Xobni (our coverage), the Outlook add-in that "socializes your inbox," by automatically extracting info from both your email and LinkedIn. However, Gist's ability to grab recent attachments is more like Xoopit's Gmail add-on (our coverage) that helps you uncover the images, files, and videos you've been emailed. Gist really combines the best of both of those plugins and delivers its results as a web application. Clearly, Gist's service is geared more towards sales professionals, though, as they need to keep up with tons of clients. However, this intelligent application is something that anyone with an overloaded inbox could take advantage of.

Gist's CEO is T.A. McCann, a Seattle-based former Microsoftie who previously worked in Microsoft's Exchange Server Group, an experience which no doubt familiarized him with the information overload occurring in today's inboxes. The company is backed by Paul Allen's Vulcan Capital.

We Want In!

We would love to tell you want we thought of Gist ourselves instead of just describing its features, but Gist is in private beta, and they seem to be very exclusive about who gets in. We couldn't even get an invite for RWW! You can sign up for an invite here, so send us one if you get in before we do.

The SmartDesktop application is designed to be used by individuals who to assist with organization of emails and files by project. (A framework for developers is also available). The application only works on Windows machines and supports the following applications:

• Microsoft Outlook 2003, 2007
• Microsoft Word 2003, 2007
• Microsoft Excel 2003, 2007
• Microsoft PowerPoint 2003, 2007
• Microsoft Visio 2003, 2007
• Microsoft Project 2003, 2007
• Internet Explorer v6, v7
• Mozilla Firefox v1, v2, v3
• Adobe Acrobat v6, v7, v8
• Adobe Reader v7, v8
• AutoDesk AutoCAD 2007, 2008
• Compatible with Google Docs
• Compatible with Zoho Sheets

While traditionally a software program like this would stick to only supporting other desktop software, the company seems to have taken note of the online office trend and has decided to branch out from being solely tied to the machine to support some cloud apps as well. With support for both Google Docs and Zoho (only Zoho Sheets, unfortunately), there's a chance for SmartDesktop to succeed among the online crowd as well. That is, assuming they continue to add support for online services, including the rest of Zoho's suite.

To really benefit from a program like SmartDesktop, you need to have a lot of data stored in files across both the web and your machine and no time or inclination to organize it on your own. But you don't need to work on "projects" to use SmartDesktop; it is meant to organize anything that you're working on, whether personal events, managing clients, doing research, planning a budget, etc. In SmartDesktop, a "project" is just the container for the files, email, and web pages that are related to each other.

This structure takes SmartDesktop beyond being just another desktop search app. Instead of just scanning your hard drive for keywords, it starts with a project-oriented view of your information and doesn't even index the information you haven't touched. This way, search results are faster and contain much less noise.

Will SmartDesktop really help people deal with information overload? Those interested in finding out can can sign up to be alerted when the beta is made available for download: just click here.

Information Overload By the Numbers

• $650 billion: Annual cost of interruptions for knowledge workers in the United States
• 28% of a worker's time is spent dealing with interruptions that are neither urgent nor important
• 6 Hours Per Week: Time lost due to context switching (multi-tasking, pausing, etc) - Does this means the Louis Gray's and Scobles are still few and far between?

Intel also contributed their own internally collected numbers:

• Average employee receives 350 messages per week
• Average executive receives over 300 messages per day
• Employees spend about 20 hours per week managing email, 2 hours of which is unnecessary email

Discussing Solutions

When talking about solutions to the information overload problem, the key areas that were touched on were process, training, and raising awareness. Intel also mentioned a couple of solutions they have implemented themselves - one being the use of "quiet periods" of 4 hours twice per week where people can disconnect from communication and fully focus on getting things done. They also make use of an internal software program called the "Intel Email Effectiveness Coach," that warns people when they're about to do something stupid, like send a message to 2000 people. (Wow - they should sell that!)

As far as software solutions go, Jared provides us a short list of the highlights. Here's what he said stood out:

• RescueTime - keeps track of not just your activities on your computer but those of your office mates, enabling you to see how you stack up and when you're slacking
• Slife - similar to RescueTime in that it gathers statistics about computer usage, but data is primarily kept locally rather than "in the cloud"
• SmartDesktop - Imagine your computer knew what was contextually relevant no matter what you were doing on it. (Private Beta)
• Seriosity - an economics-based approach to email management whereby one attaches virtual currency to their messages
• ActionBase - Turns Outlook into a database of sorts for knowledge management and wiki-like email correspondence
• Talk2Us - Jared called this one a "crazy voice recognition manage-your-life software that's in private beta"
• ClearContext - Helps you to better identify important information, group relevant items together, and generally have a better workflow within Outlook
• Permessa -Enterprise unified messaging for performance and compliance monitoring

Jared himself is also the creator of AwayFind, a tool that lets you get away from email without getting out of reach.

We will take a look at some of these other solutions over the coming weeks here at RWW and let you know what we think.

Image Credit: Autoroute: Mzlle Biscotte

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/iorg_discusses_solutions_for_i.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/iorg_discusses_solutions_for_i.php Trends Wed, 23 Jul 2008 08:00:00 -0800 Sarah Perez Here are some of the highlights from the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we explored Yahoo's ongoing troubles, reported on Firefox 3's record-setting week, covered a new "universal edit" wiki offering, and checked out some Mobile Web apps. On the trends side, we looked at what could disrupt Google search, explored the issue of 'info overload', analyzed lessons from Flickr, polled you about IM clients, and interviewed VC Brad Feld.
]]>Sponsor

]]> Web Products

Yahoo's Product Strategy

There's been a lot of hand wringing in the media lately about Yahoo's rejection of Microsoft's takeover bid. Most of the coverage has focused on the (very serious) financial and people issues that Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang is now facing. But this week RWW focused on the impact on Yahoo's product line. Yahoo's key properties remain yahoo.com, email, myyahoo, and even Answers can be considered special. In short, content is what continues to drive Yahoo and those core properties are still enormously popular. It's just a shame Yahoo got bumped out of the way in social networking and online video -- two high growth content segments in recent times. Click through to read our recommendations for Yahoo.

See also: Yahoo Clings to Its Leading Web "Starting Points"

Firefox 3 Sets Download 'Record'

This week Firefox set out to break a record for most downloads in a 24-hour period. It surpassed the 5 million download mark it set out to meet well within the time limit - and ended up with 10.1 million downloads! We polled our readers: are you using Firefox 3? Do you plan to upgrade? Here are the results:

See also: Get Firefox and Vuze is Another Good Download

Wiki Providers Come Together to Offer Universal Edit Button

Leave it to people in the wiki market to know how to collaborate. Nearly 20 different wiki providers have teamed up to offer a new Firefox extension that will notify users whenever they are on a page that is publicly editable, using a standard icon that sits in the same place the RSS autodiscovery icon appears. Clicking on the icon (img. on the left) will take you to that page's editing interface. It's a great little idea that could help breath new life into the wiki community. We would love to see the extension become a standard part of Firefox.

Loopt: Another Mobile Contender

Loopt is the third location aware mobile social network to become available for the majority of U.S. smartphones . It joins fellow competitors Whrrl and Brightkite, both of which have already started to gain traction (see our coverage of Brightkite here). However, this is not a market where the first one to debut on the smartphone will be the ultimate winner. Instead, in the wild west of the mobile social networks, the key will be adoption. This is an area where Loopt is making headway, having recently announced deals with all the major U.S. carriers and support for Blackberry smartphones.

See also: Fring API Could Shake Up the Mobile Web and Mobile Banking on the Rise

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

11 Search Trends That May Disrupt Google

Bernard Lunn's first post for ReadWriteWeb (nearly a year ago) started with the premise that search was "game over", that Google had won and the only opportunity left was (re)search - i.e. what one does after the basic search. Unfortunately, none of the search start-ups since then has made a dent in Google's relentless march towards search market dominance. In this article, we outline 11 search trends that may change that.

Info Overload: The Problem & Solution

This was a 2-part series on today's information overload problem and how we can cope. Part 2 is here.

Information overload is no longer a joke. For those who suffered with this affliction, it never was, but now that there are real numbers attached to the problem, it has finally prompted companies to take action. Those numbers come from a recent study by a research company called Basex and they are to the tune of $650 billion in wasted productivity. Ironically, the time wasted comes from use of applications and technologies that are supposed to make workers more productive. Unfortunately, they seem to have the opposite effect.

Learning from Flickr's Co-founders on Their Way Out of Yahoo

In June 2005 Yahoo! acquired upstart Canadian photosharing web site Flickr and the web hasn't been the same since. Yahoo, on the other hand, didn't change nearly as much as everyone expected it to. Pre-CEO Jerry Yang told then-Business 2.0 writer Erick Schonfeld six months after the deal "I look at Flickr with envy, it feels like where the Web is going." Flickr co-founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield have now cashed out and officially left the company. Though Yahoo! doesn't appear to have internalized many of the lessons of Flickr, it's not too late for the rest of us to look at those same key lessons for inspiration in our work on the web.

See also: 72Photos Offers a New, Sleek Alternative to Flickr

Why IM Interoperability May Just be a Dream

Interoperability between instant messaging (IM) clients is something a lot of users have wished for. More specifically, we wish it was standard and provided right out of the box instead of having to turn to third parties such as Adium, Digsby, Trillian, or Pidgin. Yet there seems to be a problem with the concept of interoperability for the companies of the more popular IM clients.

Also see the results of our poll on IM clients:

Note: 3 IM clients were added belatedly to the poll, due to demand in the comments of our post. Therefore the numbers for Pidgin, Miranda, and Apple's iChat are under-represented.

People in Tech: Brad Feld, Foundry Group

MIT Alumni, technologist, venture capitalist, marathon runner, Colorado dweller, thinker, blogger, and all around super human, Brad Feld (LinkedIn, Twitter) has made a huge impact on startups. With posts on his personal blog, Feld Thoughts, and on Ask The VC (a must read for anyone interested in venture funding) Feld has played a major roll in lifting the curtain on the traditionally mysterious venture process. We recently caught up with him for a quick interview.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

Finally, check out the latest episode of RWW Live, in which Sean Ammirati from ReadWriteTalk, Richard MacManus from ReadWriteWeb, Steve O’Hear from Last100 and Charles Knight from AltSearchEngines discuss a number of big events over the last week.

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/weekly_wrapup_16-20_june_2008.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/weekly_wrapup_16-20_june_2008.php Weekly Wrapups Sat, 21 Jun 2008 05:00:00 -0800 Richard MacManus This is post #2 of a 2-part post on today's information overload problem and how we can cope. Please read part 1 here.

The information overload problem has reached a critical point. Workers drowning in their inboxes and jumping from task to task have now cost the nation $650 billion in lost productivity. A research group attempting to understand and combat the problem has recently been formed. We can either wait for answers for them, or we can start finding solutions ourselves. Let's do what social media addicts do best: let's crowdsource this thing!

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]]> Nature vs. Nurture

Without a thorough understanding of psychology, it's hard to determine whether those who keep up with the overload of information are somehow wired differently than those who become overwhelmed. We do know that there are varying levels of distractibility in children - the severely distracted are sometimes even diagnosed as suffering with a medical disorder. They are often treated with pharmaceuticals to combat this, so it seems entirely possible that that nature plays a role in how well we cope.

However, that's not to say that we all can't learn a few tricks to better manage our information overload. Below, we'll present some ideas to help fight this problem, but please share your ideas in the comments too, so we can all learn from each other.

Create a Routine

When facing a full inbox, new tweets, new posts on FriendFeed, and an RSS reader with 1000+ unread items, the stress often comes from not knowing where to begin. This is where having a routine can be important. An everyday ritual where you deal with A, then B, then C, etc. can help you put everything in order. Not everyone's routine will be the same - the trick is finding one that works for you, then sticking with it.

Last month, Jeremiah Owyang shared his morning habits on Twitter, which prompted a discussion on FriendFeed. For Jeremiah, he like to begin his day by reading then blogging for two hours before delving into email or work.

An earlier post by social media enthusiast Louis Gray also had him sharing his daily routine, something he called his "social media consumption workflow." This post seemed to conflict with a later post he wrote about continuous parallel attention, but, after speaking with Louis, we cleared up the confusion. For him, the trick is to begin the day with the routine, then continue the day in the parallel attention mode (more on that later).

For Louis, the routine is 1) Email, 2) Read RSS feeds, 3) Twitter, 4) FriendFeed, then 5) Miscellaneous Additional Activity. Others responded in the comments of that post and via blog posts with variations on this routine, but the elements were either very similar or the same, just in a different order.

Yes, structuring social media consumption sounds a lot like work, doesn't it? Well, considering the 8 or 10 hours some of us put in a day behind the computer screen, I'd argue that it most certainly is work. No matter what your personal routine is, the bottom line is to stick to it.

Easily Distracted? Dial Down the Noise...Temporarily

While it would be great to treat noise pollution like the goldmine it should be, the truth is, a good many people are easily distracted. Twitter, FriendFeed, email, IM, and RSS take away our focus when we're really concentrating and switching to and from each task can mess us up. Instead of pining away for the overstimulated sponge-like skills of Scoble, it may be time to embrace this quality about yourself and use it to your advantage. Just because you're not able to write a great post while concurrently dealing with new email and IMs, that doesn't mean there's anything inherently wrong with you that needs fixing.

Even the great American novelist Steven King admitted that when he's writing a novel, he locks himself in a room and commits to no distractions. In his book, On Writing, he says this about his writing room:


"Writing room: really needs only one thing: a door which you are willing to shut. The closed door is your way of telling the world and yourself that you mean business; you have made a serious commitment to write and intend to walk the walk as well as talk the talk...The door closes the rest of the world out; it also serves to close you in and keep you focused on the job at hand...No telephone. It's wise to eliminate every possible distraction. If you continue to write, you will begin to filter out these distractions naturally, but at the start it's best to try and take care of them before you write."

Want to eliminate your distractions, it's easy. Disable email alerts. Exit Twitter, sign out of IM or set yourself as "busy." Trying to write? Launch Darkroom, Notepad, or Windows Live Writer. Then just work...in peace.

Later on, as you become better at whatever it is that you're doing, noisiness can be slowly added back in, but you can't go from zero to sixty overnight.

That being said, it's not a good idea to spend an entire day in this state - as our own Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote not too long ago, there are many reasons why online noise is good for you. However, if you need a quite half hour or hour to really focus, there's no harm in that. It's not the end of the world.

Learn To Embrace Distraction

No this isn't a contradiction to the section above, it's just what's next. You may find yourself easily distracted when performing a certain task whether at work or at home - like solving a complex problem, for example - but after that task is complete, you can turn up the volume again.

To get a crash course in this behavioral technique, we'll turn again to the post on "continuous partial attention" where Louis described how he deals with info overload. While it may seem unbelievable to some, Louis claims to be able to watch TV while writing blog posts or write emails while listening to music while reading RSS feeds and watching Twitter update.

"No way!," you think? It is possible - it might not come naturally to everyone, but you can, in fact, learn to do this...at least a bit. The trick here is to start small and not try to do this when performing those tasks that require the most concentration (as mentioned above). What throws people off is thinking themselves incapable of this type of multi-tasking because certain aspects of their work require more of their focused attention than others. You must first identify the areas of work where you need less distraction and turn down the volume. When those tasks are complete, crank it up again. Simple, right?

Create Your Own Filters

In order to process mass amounts of information, you'll also need to identify and attack what we'll called the unfiltered noise. This may be in the form of "bacn" in your inbox, busy Twitterers, RSS feeds spliced with links from del.icio.us, or extraneous information on FriendFeed. To get back in control, you have to invest time in structuring the noise.

For example, most email programs have rules or filters that you can use - whether it's Outlook at work or Gmail at home, you have to take the time to set these things up. Unless you're using the GTD method to immediately combat every piece of mail as it arrives - something which only certain people have been able to master - then you'll need to establish a routine to deal with the lower priority mail at a particular time. For social media users, the big problem in our inboxes is "bacn" - these are the informational, but non-critical messages from the networks and services we've signed up for. A suggestion here is to not let these messages constantly steal your focus - deal with them en masse on a regular basis, but have them automatically archived upon arrival.

For RSS, the trick is using folders wisely. Not all feeds are created equal. You can separate lower-priority feeds from high-priority ones, classify feeds by genre, or move the feeds from bloggers who write long, thoughtful blog posts into a folder so you can thoroughly read them at a later time. Whatever the method you choose, it's important to set up a structure so you know what to read and when.

For example, less important feeds could be in a folder that you can hop into at any point in the day and flip through quickly when you have a minute. Feeds that you only browse if you have time to kill can be put in a "Can Miss" folder. Feeds where you like to comment and participate can be put into a "Great Blogs" folder. Blogger Mrinal added he likes to use people as filters. for example, in Google Reader, your friends' shared items is a great place to find human filters for content. These are just a few ideas - all that matters is that it works for you.



For Twitter and FriendFeed or any other social network or service you're involved in, it's just a simple matter of time management. Don't get so caught up that you're spending every minute of your day there. Set a time of day when you're going to delve in and really participate and for the rest of the day just keep jumping in and out when you want to. Yes, you might miss something here and there, but it's OK. Really.

Conclusion

This is by no means a definitive guide to dealing with information management nor will these suggestions work for everyone. This is only meant to spark a conversation about the subject so we can learn new tips and techniques from each other. Please share yours in the comments.

Image Credits: Mobile Email: natala; Noise: GetEntrepreneurial

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/info_overload_what_can_we_do.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/info_overload_what_can_we_do.php Trends Wed, 18 Jun 2008 10:00:00 -0800 Sarah Perez

This will be post #1 of 2 posts on today's information overload problem and how we can cope. Part 2 is here.

Information overload is no longer a joke. For those who suffered with this affliction, it never was, but now that there are real numbers attached to the problem, it has finally prompted companies to take action. Those numbers come from a recent study by a research company called Basex and they are to the tune of $650 billion in wasted productivity. Ironically, the time wasted comes from use of applications and technologies that are supposed to make workers more productive. Unfortunately, they seem to have the opposite effect.

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]]> Information Worker Overload

This $650 billion dollar problem made the headlines this week, getting write-ups in both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Thanks to a research study by Basex, we now have new data on productivity in the workplace. The findings reveal that a typical information worker checks his or her email more than 50 times per day, uses IM 77 times, and visits 40+ web sites. These numbers were calculated by tracking software installed on the machines of the 40,000 people taking part in the study.

Often, workers are dropping high-level tasks to deal with mundane, low-priority tasks that come through via these unnecessary interruptions. The end result is fractured attention where the big loss comes from the time it takes to recover from the interruption and get back to work.

"Productivity" Apps

Although we should know better, it may already be too late for us; we're conditioned creatures who are drawn to these distractions. A pop-up alerting us to new email? We must check it. A flashing IM window? Just try to ignore it. These "productivity" apps, it seems, by their very nature, have been designed to steal our focus.

Big tech companies are worried, too. They've put together a group called IORG (Information Overload Research Group) whose founders include IBM, Microsoft, Google, Intel, and a dozen other companies and academic institutions.

This group's mission is to:

"Conduct research, help define best practices, contribute to the creation of solutions, share information and resources, offer guidance and facilitation, and help make the business case for fighting information overload."

It will be interesting to see what they come up with as far as solutions because they're certainly not the first to attempt a solution to the problem. Earlier this year, we covered five methodologies to deal with email overload, which included popular techniques like the GTD method and the 4-Hour Workweek Method. Despite numerous proposed solutions such as these, no one has really hit the sweet spot when it comes to providing real solutions that work for everyone.

Social Media Addicts - Sink or Swim?

For social media addicts, which likely includes readers of this blog, the problem can be even worse. In addition to having our focus pulled away by productivity applications like email and IM, we're also pulled in a number of different directions as well - checking FriendFeed, Twitter, social networks, and more. (I wonder how many billions of dollars we waster per year?)

For many people, these distractions are overpowering. No matter the time commitment, social media addicts can't help but spend entire chunks of their day online playing with the new, shiny internet toys. When we profiled several social media addicts earlier this year on Twitter, we discovered that a good many people spent several hours - even as many as 10 hours per day - online, immersed in the web and social media tools.

It seems we're at a crossroads - there's so much information, but not enough filters. We can either drown in the lost productivity time sink that is the internet or we can swim...swim for our lives. The question is: how?

Click here to read Part 2 of this post

Image Credit: Autoroute: Mzlle Biscotte

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/info_overload_the_problem.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/info_overload_the_problem.php Trends Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:32:38 -0800 Sarah Perez Sometimes it's just hard to keep up. In this technology-focused niche we all live in there are new applications, new initiatives, and new platforms that spring up every day, not to mention constantly breaking news that fills our RSS readers. Take a day off and you're behind. Take an hour off and you just missed 300 more blog posts. In addition to the everyday struggles of information overload the average computer user deals with - like the overflowing inbox, for example - those in the internet/new media/technology space aren't just overwhelmed with new content, but also with new applications and choices to manage that content. What's a web-app loving person to do?
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]]> Drowning in Awesomeness

The double-edged sword that comes with keeping abreast of all the latest developments in technology means that we're always aware of the latest and greatest applications and services to try...but it also means that we've tried all of them. Unlike the average user, who doesn't even bother creating a Facebook profile until several of their friends cajole them into doing so, technology early adopters are the first to sign up and create profiles on every service that launches.

Sometimes these services have value; if so, they trickle down to the rest of the world over time. For example, social networks like MySpace and Facebook changed the way people interacted online. Flickr made photo sharing fun, easy, and social. YouTube let everyone be a star. However, sometimes they're not so great after all, and they end up fading away into nothingness in that area we've affectionately dubbed the "deadpool."

These failures don't seem to dampen our enthusiasm for trying the "next big thing," though. Every day, the web is filled with posts about this new app or that great service. When you think about it, it's really rather impressive that there are that many of them out there - enough to be written about in a seemingly nonstop fashion.

For technology enthusiasts, it's not enough to just "try" the new apps and services though. If they're the next big thing (or so everyone says), we're supposed to jump on board and use them, use them, use them. Scoble even recently threatened to expose some of the so-called "A-Listers" for not being active enough, saying:

"I thought about embarrassing most of the A listers on FriendFeed, because very few of them actually read that many blogs (I can tell, they rarely comment on, or link to, or FriendFeed with other people’s blogs)"

Right....because if they're not on FriendFeed, they're phonies, huh?

So, no. Commentary is not enough. We're supposed to live, breathe, eat, sleep, and dream this stuff. The problem is, while we're busy experimenting with this new thing and that new thing, we might miss out on actually enjoying the services that are already there for us, working just fine, thank you very much.

Too Many Choices

However, there are certain areas we've noticed that seem to be the biggest sources of conflict as of late. In these areas, several companies are clamoring to be the winner of the space, releasing duplicate or similar products, constantly adding new features, and generally trying to one-up their competitors in an effort to come out on top. When there are several companies doing the same thing, it gets confusing for the average user and time-consuming for the early adopters who play with everything. In the end, the hope is that one great service would come out on top, but that's hardly ever the case. We're already on MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, and LinkedIn because there's no one winner for social networks...are we going to have to use all these newcomers battling it out, too?

The Battle to Be Open

We never thought we would see the day that the big companies were actually fighting to see who can be the most open of the bunch, but that seems to be exactly what's taking place now in the battle of the social graph APIs. You've got Google's Friend Connect service vs. Facebook's Connect service vs. MySpace's Data Availability, each announced within days of each other. Instead of making it easy for users to understand what it means to be maximizing a social graph, the companies have just flooded the feeds with their separate announcements. As Marshall reported on Monday, the reason, at least according to Google is that "the beauty of open standards is that companies don't have to talk. They can just meet up around interoperable technologies." We would like to think that this battle for openness will lead to easier-to-use social networks as our friend graphs will get to follow us around, but something about the timing of these separate announcements smells like a battle brewing.

The Battle of the Lifestreams

There's MyBlogLog's lifestream, FriendFeed, Lifestream.fm and even Facebook's attempt at lifestreaming, which involves integrating a handful of services into users' Mini-Feeds and News Feeds. Too much? You betcha. Although FriendFeed is getting buzz, even it doesn't offer a way to really filter the info it displays. Sure, the "filter by service" Greasemonkey script can help narrow down content and the Friends & Groups script can help sort your friends into groups of your own choosing, but we shouldn't have to rely on a Firefox add-on to make our apps work for us. And while FriendFeed may be one service (besides Twitter, of course) that internet addicts can't live without, it still has a way to go to cross over to the mainstream user, especially if Facebook starts offering similar integration.

The Battle to Tweet on AIR

It seemed that every time our favorite Twitter AIR app Twhirl was updated, Alert Thingy followed suit and vice versa. Both struggled to integrate FriendFeed into their stream while still providing the best Twitter-on-the-desktop experience, and neither really accomplished that. Alert Thingy integrated FriendFeed updates into its stream in one window while Twhirl went with a second window just for FriendFeed. Neither was a perfect solution. Alert Thingy lacks the Twitter-specific features of Twhirl and Twhirl's two windows isn't ideal for users concerned with desktop real estate, like laptop users. What's worse is that in addition to Twhirl/Alert Thingy battle, we also had to contend with other also-rans which included both Twitter, FriendFeed, and combo apps like Snitter, Spaz, Feedalizr, bTT, and MySocial's browser sidebar and AIR app.

The Battle to Filter Your RSS

It's not just RSSmeme vs. ReadBurner - although that's an obvious pairing. Both of those sites feature top shared items from Google Reader. RSSmeme recently launched an API, which means it now offers filtering, albeit the geeky sort involving the creation of custom URLs. ReadBurner, not to be outdone, announced NetVibes support shortly thereafter. However, Google saw that other services were springing up around their RSS reader, so in an effort to keep people in "Googleland" they added friends to your reader to allow for a more personalized filtering experience. Those friends can also now share items with notes, so you don't even need to go elsewhere to comment on the items in the feeds.

Unfortunately, the downside to the friends feature means that in addition to those feeds that you now subscribe to, you're also reading suggestions from friends. Not that they're not great and everything, but is it really so hard for Google Reader to go ahead and mark it as read in your feed list if your friend's shared item is from a blog whose feed you already subscribe to? Apparently it is. Which means if it's really good news, we'll read it twice. Or even three times if someone else shares it later on. There might be a light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to filtering Google Reader via AideRSS, but ranking by popularity is really only one way to find the best content. There's something to be said for the hidden gems that get overlooked, too.

But the battle of RSS filtering doesn't end with Google Reader either. Perhaps not as apparent, but both Twitter and FriendFeed are slowly becoming people's preferred method of getting news. Why read through hundreds of unread, unranked items just to stay on top of the news? If it's any good, you'll hear it on Twitter or see it shared on FriendFeed. Some users are even positioning themselves as "human information filters," on these services, something our newest ReadWriteWeb contributor, Corvida, discussed not to long ago on her personal site. These highly active users (yes Scoble and Louis come to mind) are good friends to have on the service since they'll constantly be posting and filtering the best stuff for you.

Then there are the other memetrackers that exist to highlight the top stories of the day, too: Techmeme is at the top of the list, of course, but there are also newcomers/up-and-commers like LinkRiver, Techsted, SocialMedian, and community builder BlogRize. I'm just scratching the surface here and that's already ten different ways to filter the news.

The Battle of the Mobile Social Networks

This one will really surprise those not following the mobile networking space closely. When researching mobile network up-and-comer Brightkite, I stumbled upon a slew of mobile networks already competing in the space.

There's MocoSpace, Friendstribe, Hobnobster, Dodgeball, Zyb, mig33, Mobiluck, MeetMoi, JuiceCaster, Loopnote, Rabble, Wadja, Treemo, groovr, flagr, Lime Juice, Loopt, and Next2Friends, to name just a few. There are, in fact, many, many more. Some focus on texting, some on sharing images, others on geo-tagging, and others on traditional social networking. They're all acting like the mobile web is the wild west and if they can just get there first they might have a shot at winning.

However, who wants to bet that the mobile networks everyone ends up using are the ones who aren't pretending that the mobile web is some different web altogether? Even more likely winners are the mobile versions of MySpace and Facebook, where all your friends already exist.

The Battle of the Social News Sites

Of course there's Digg. But Digg is opening up the space for competition once again now that they're focused on going mainstream and featuring less technology news. Mixx seems to be doing well as a small, friendly tech social news site, but they're not the only one looking to catch the Digg overflow. There's also Yahoo Buzz, Propeller, Reddit, Digg-for-girls Kirtsy (formerly Sk*rt), Sphinn, roll-your-own Digg tool Pligg, please-don't-link to us Hacker News, and "if-we-ran-Digg" clone Sift'd. While all these sites are great for getting a post noticed by a wider audience, they're also multiplying the numbers of places you can read the exact same story you read hours ago in Google Reader, saw tweeted on Twitter, shared in FriendFeed, promoted on Techmeme, etc.

What Can We Do?

It's hard to say. Early adopters are not going to stop playing with every new service, but it's clear that we're getting to a point where tools that centralize, aggregate, but most importantly filter our content are going to be the ones that win out. There are only so many hours in the day, and, as it stands right now, every single one of them could be filled just consuming and interacting with content, social media, and web services. There's also this little thing called "going outside" that we would like to take part in, too. Hopefully we'll see the killer web app to filter the noise someday soon to help us do so, but it's definitely not here yet. ]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/too_many_choices_too_much_content.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/too_many_choices_too_much_content.php Trends Wed, 14 May 2008 04:00:00 -0800 Sarah Perez Earlier this this year, we commented on the infamous Steve Jobs quote "...the fact is people don't read anymore," arguing that, people do read, they just prefer to do it online. However, in this transition from page to screen, a question has risen: are people really reading online content or just scanning page? Apparently, it's the latter.

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]]> The Research on Web Reading

Jakob Nielson, web usability consultant, author, and owner of useit.com, writes on his site about a recent research study by Harald Weinreich, Hartmut Obendorf, Eelco Herder, and Matthias Mayer: "Not Quite the Average: An Empirical Study of Web Use."

What Nielsen found by analyzing the data in the study was that although people spend more time on pages with more words and more information, they only spend 4.4 seconds more for each additional 100 words. By calculating reading rates, he concluded that when you add more verbiage to a page, people will only read 18% of it.

Some other interesting findings include:

• On an average visit, users read half the information only on those pages with 111 words or less.
• People spend some of their time understanding the page layout and navigation features, as well as looking at the images. People don't read during every single second of a page visit.
• On average, users will have time to read 28% of the words if they devote all of their time to reading. More realistically, users will read about 20% of the text on the average page

Nielsen has been interested in how users read on the web for a long time and he has determined that the truth is that people don't read very much, often scanning text instead of really reading it. His recent eyetracking studies validate this finding, as well.

Unlike with newspapers, books, magazines and other print media, it's not just images that distract people from fully digesting the web content they're reading. As social media users ourselves, we know how difficult it is to get through a long article when dealing with email notifications, pop-ups of new replies on Twitter, instant messages, not to mention that urge to check for the latest news in our RSS feeds.

Do Some People Have a Natural Info Processing Mechanism?

Given that the world of online readers have turned to scanning text to keep up with the constant flow of information, we wonder if some people are better than others at doing so. Are there people who have a natural ability to scan and process massive amounts of information, yet still be able to find the signal amongst the noise?

It's an interesting question to ponder, especially considering the conversations of late surrounding whether or not it's possible to truly understand, interact, and engage with others when taking in so much information.

For example, in Scoble's blog post where he explained why he was following 20,000 users on Twitter, he had people wondering how he could really keep up. After calculating how fast the tweets came in, Brian Sullivan wrote:

I know there are claims that Robert is a cyborg...so that seems not a plausible explanation. I think then that Robert's claim is somewhat suspect (of course his definition of "follow" may be different from mine -- or my math may be wrong)...Are you really "following" 20,000 on Twitter - at least in any real sense of the word "follow"?

Morgan wondered, "How can this type of information flow be beneficial to anyone?" But it was Elliott Ng, who wished for  "the same massive information processing gene as Robert Scoble."

Although meant perhaps jokingly, the question is valid. How do these people do it?

Our very own Marshall Kirkpatrick hinted at some of his tricks in his "7 Tips for Making the Most of Your RSS Reader post," claiming he doesn't worry about trying to read every item in his reader. Louis Gray, on the other hand, declares he never marks all as read. But everyone really needs to find their own balance when it comes to digesting the information they consume.

Do you read or do you just skim? What's your strategy for keeping up?

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_stats_are_in_youre_just_skimming_this_article.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_stats_are_in_youre_just_skimming_this_article.php Trends Wed, 07 May 2008 08:40:08 -0800 Sarah Perez