There are too many information available for you to read every day and the more you spend time reading, the less you will take time to act on what you have read. (If you want a free direct pdf version of this article, go to the end of this post).

Richard Saul Wurman said in his book, Information Anxiety, that:

“There has been more information produced in the last 30 years than during the previous 5000″

This applies for the blogosphere too to certain extent. In the blogosphere, lots of information has been written today than a few years ago.

How will you manage online information overload?

Firstly, what is information overload?

According to Alvin Toffler, who coined to the term information overload, it refers to an excess amount of information being provided, making processing and absorbing tasks very difficult for the individual because sometimes we cannot see the validity behind the information.

Image Source: Information Overload by cambodia4kidsorg

How does this affect you in blogging?

Due to tons of information available online, which is increasing at a rapid rate every day, you have no time to process the information. As a result, you will neither learn a lot nor act on what you have already learned.

In whatever niche you are, there are already hundreds of good blogs if not thousands. To update yourself in your niche, you have to follow all these blogs. But following all the hundreds of blogs is merely impossible. Even if you subscribe to all the blogs, you are not going to read every post from every blog.

A year back, I subscribed to as many as 127 blogs. At times I used to go offline for a couple of days. Whenever I take short breaks and open my RSS reader after returning, I used to have at least 200+ unread items. I have heard people say they have 1000+ unread items. Is it possible to go through all of them and still have time to act on what you have learned? If you said ‘yes, it is possible for me’, consider yourself gifted. You won’t find much helpful information in this post. You can contact me and let me know how you do it if you wish. I’d be happy to learn from you.

But if you are like me, who cannot read hundreds of useful articles a day and act on whatever I have learned, this post is for you.

I’m going to share with you the exact techniques that have worked for me to avoid information overload. I have been using these methods for nearly 6 months and it has worked very well for me.

Image Source: New Controls in Google Reader
by Yandle

1. Subscribe to Less Blogs

If you want less information, subscribe to less blogs. Simple. If you are going to subscribe to 100+ blogs, you will come across the same thing I experienced (the above example). Be selective when subscribing to blogs. As I said, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of good blogs in your niche.

Here are some tips for selecting the blogs to subscribe:

A. Authority

Subscribe to all the authority blogs in your niche. If you are into blogging, subscribe to Problogger. If you are into community and social media, don’t forget to subscribe to Chris Brogan’s blog. These authority blogs will always deliver quality information. They are authority blogs for a reason. They know what they are saying.

B. Quality

This is the most important factor when you are looking for blogs to subscribe to. Read the recent posts in the blog, go through the archives and do all the research you want. It will not take more than 15 minutes for you to do the research but it will save you a lot of time in the long run.

C. Topic

Subscribe more to the blogs that belong to your niche. Subscribing to blogs that are not in your niche will not help you much. Of course you can subscribe to productivity blogs or technology blogs if you are interested. But I would recommend you to limit them.

Don’t subscribe to blogs just because your friends are subscribed to it. Think for a second or at least half a second if the blog will help you in achieving your goals. I used to do this. When my friends used to say that they have subscribed to blog A, I used to do follow them. Now I don’t do that though. Never subscribe to a blog that will not help you move forward in your life.

2. Learn to Speed Read

Take some time to learn how to skim. There are so many books out there that teach you exactly that. Grab a book and read it. Don’t mind about the time it takes you for learning how to skim. It will help you throughout your life. The best investment you can make is investment in yourself. If you spend a couple of dollars and a few hours, you can learn the art of skimming information.

Here are some articles that teach you how to speed read:

How to speed read – Boing Boing

Scientific Speed Reading: How to Read 300% Faster in 20 Minutes

3. Using Social Sites

Social sites like StumbleUpon will help you a lot in avoiding information overload if you know how to use it. There are many social sites out there. There are also niche based social sites like Sphinn. If you are a SEO blogger, you should check out Sphinn.

How to use social sites to manage information overload online?

Go to your favorite social site. My favorite is stumbleupon. So I’ll tell you how I use StumbleUpon to process information.

I search for stumbleupon users who continuously stumble articles related to my niche. You can get a RSS link of each user’s stumbles. I add this RSS to Google Reader.

Tip: Don’t subscribe to the ‘likes’ in stumbleupon. Subscribe to ‘reviews’. StumbleUpon users stumble many sites every day. You don’t want 1000+ items in your reader. SU users review only selected articles.

You can find me on StumbleUpon here. I review mostly posts related to blogging and social media.

Small Niche Based Social Sites

You can find a list of niche based social sites here.

My favorite is Sphinn. Though sphinn is a famous social site, the number of front page articles per day is low.

Create a list of social sites based on your niche and subscribe to the front page of these sites. This way, you will only read the best content in your niche.

4. Content Aggregators

Content aggregators are sites which gather the top news in all the niches or all the social sites. The popular ones are Popurls and Alltop.

Popurls

This site gathers news links from social sites and top blogs. You can customize the content which you see in the homepage by creating an account.

Alltop

Alltop gets links from top blogs and categorize it into different niches. There are plenty of niches. You can make your niche alltop as your homepage and glance through the new posts in all top blogs. You can also create your own alltop page with blogs of your choice.

5. Using Twitter

Twitter is useful in many ways. It is not just about updating what you are doing. Twitter can be used to find useful information online.

Follow people who share useful links to articles in your niche. If you are interested in social media and tech, you should follow mashable. Once you have created a list of users who share valuable content in their twitter stream, add them to a group and create a column for it. You can use a twitter client like tweetdeck to do it.

You can find me on twitter here – @Ramkarthik.

These are the techniques I use for managing online information overload. I suggest you to take this as a base and form your own techniques. What works for me might not work well for you. This is the concept. Understand it and develop your method till you find yourself managing information efficiently.

If you liked this post, please give it a stumble and/or bookmark it in del.icio.us. I appreciate it.

As I promised, here is the link to download the pdf version of managing online information overload (Right click -> ‘Save As’).

Twhirl is one of the many twitter clients. Unlike many other clients, twhirl is easy to use.

I assume you are on twitter (after all who is not in twitter these days?). Though many people prefer tweeting through the web, using a twitter client will increase your productivity.

Though there are many twitter clients, I have always preferred to use Tweetdeck. But for the last few days tweetdeck was not working for me and I had to switch to twhirl.

Twhirl is simple and makes tweeting fun. But if you are new to twhirl or thinking of giving twhirl a try, these are 5 basic settings that you should change in twhirl for better tweeting.

1. API limit

Go to settings and you will see an option called network. In this you can set the API limit. You cannot set twhirl (or any application for that matter) to update once every few seconds. If you do, you will reach the API limits and you won’t be able to tweet using the client for sometime. The API normally resets every one hour.

In this API, set how many requests you need per hour. I have set it to 30 requests per hour as you can see in the image. Once you do this, twhirl will automatically adjust the options that are following based on the requests you have set per hour.

I have disabled it for direct messages because I get DM notifications to my mail. I want to reply quickly to people who @ me and that is the reason why I have set my replies to update faster than tweets.

You can do this based on your requirements but don’t forget to set this.

2. Retweet Format

You can see the retweet format under ‘general’ in settings. The retweet format is by default like the below image.

You need to replace ‘retweeting’ with ‘RT’.

The reason why you should do this is because when you retweet by saying ”retweeting”, more characters are utilized. So change it to RT.

3. Notification with Sound

In twhirl, you have the option of getting notified of new tweets with sound. When you select this, you will be notified for all the tweets. But I feel that I get more distracted when I set this. At the same time, when I’m in some other room, I don’t want to miss my replies.

So what I do is I set sound for only the replies. Check the box which says ‘only play sound on replies/directs’.

4. Do Not Hide When Minimized

Twhirl gives you the option of automatically hiding the client when you minimize. I normally do not prefer this. I don’t want twhirl to hide whenever I minimize. I don’t have the habit of having too many applications running at the same time. So having twhirl running without hiding will not be a problem for me.

Go to settings and select general tab. Here you have to uncheck the box that says ‘hide when minimized’.

5. Lookup Profiles in Browser

Most of the twitter clients have this function where if you click on a user’s profile, it will be loaded in the client itself. I hate this since I cannot get a proper view of the user profile in the client. It shows in a small column. Even if it did show in a big space, I would never prefer to see the profiles in the client.

Go to the general tab under settings and click on the drop down list box which says ‘By default, lookup profiles’. Select ‘in browser’.

After you do all this, don’t forget to save. If you don’t save, the changes won’t have any effect.

Try twhirl for a change and see how it works for you. Let me know in the comments what other settings need to be changed in twhirl when someone has just installed twhirl or started using twhirl.

You can follow me on twitter here.

Challenges are fun isn’t it? In my case, it really was interesting. I took the 7 day pure self-discipline challenge last week (on 3rd June). The challenge ended yesterday and here is the result.

What did I challenge myself to do?

I followed this post written by Glen Allsop in his blog on pure self-discipline and challenged myself the following three things:

1. One blog post everyday in this blog for seven days

2. No twitter

3. Sleep for not more than 6 hours (11PM-5AM)

The Results:

1. One blog post everyday for seven days

This one didn’t come out like I wished. I was supposed to write 7 posts (one everyday). But I ended up writing only 4 posts. But hey, 4 posts in 7 days is better than 1 post a week. It was quite hard to write one post a day since I’m not quite used to it.

This challenge helped me a lot and I’m sure my posting frequency will only get better. Also I’ll be concentrating on quality of blog posts.

2. No twitter

This one was a success. I didn’t post a single tweet for a full week. In fact I hadn’t posted for 2 days when I started the challenge. That makes 9 days of no tweeting. There were 3-4 tweets which were automated from Friendfeed. I disabled the automatic ‘friendfeed to twitter’ posting one day before the challenge ended.

This increased my productivity. I had time to accomplish a lot of things.

3. Sleep for not more than 6 hours (11PM-5AM)

This went on well on all days except Saturday. On Saturday, I slept at 12PM and got up at only 8AM. That’s 8 hours. The rest of the days were pretty good. I didn’t sleep exactly at 11PM or get up exactly at 5AM but somewhat in that range.

This also helped me in becoming more productive. I had time to play football (or soccer if that’s how you call it) every morning with my friends and yet get my work done.

This challenge is surely a success. Now I can stay away from twitter whenever I wish and still be happy. I can get up early in the morning and be productive throughout the day.

Did you take up the challenge? Or will you be taking up the challenge? Please let me know your views in the comments. I’ll be glad to hear what you have got to share.

Image Source: My design for Twitter’s “over capacity” screen by Mykl Roventine

It has been quite long since I have done a links post in this blog. I’m starting it again and from this week, you will see “useful reads” post in this blog every Sunday.

I’ll be sharing some of the useful links I have stumbled upon. If you have any links that you feel to be good, let me know through the contact form and I’ll be glad to add it in the next week’s links post.

So here we go

1. Amazing Blogs: 1-2-3 Plan Every Blogger Should Know

Sonia Simone, in this blog post at Copyblogger, explains how you can stand out from the crowd. There are millions of blogs. Many topics are covered by bloggers everyday. What can you do to make people read your blog instead of million other blogs? This 1-2-3 plan shares some tips for doing it.

2. A Forgotten Key to Blogging Success

This is a post which is targeted to solve the same issue as the first link – building successful blog. Glen Allsop, in this post at Write to done, gives you examples of successful bloggers who have one thing in common for their blogging success – “Being personal”.

3. 5 WordPress.TV Videos worth a Watch

In this post, Janith shares 5 videos from WordPress.TV that bloggers should watch. They are about getting started with Google analytics, blogging in real time, the twitter friendly links plugin, speeding up WordPress with gears for firefox and intense debate plugins which help you to take comments even further.

4. How I Earned $1000+ in Blog Revenue Last Month

Marko Saric’s blog at ‘How to make my blog’ is one of the blogs I recently added to my Google reader. He has written some quality blog posts recently and this post I have shared with you is one of them. It shows you how he earned $1000+ in blog revenue last month. Read and figure out how you can implement it in your blog.

5. 101 Blogging Headlines

This post is from Lyndon Antcliff in his new site called Magnetic Headlines. In this post, he shares 101 killer headlines for blogging which you can modify and use it in your blog. He also shares headline ideas for many other topics in his blog.

Hope you found all the links useful. Let me know if you have written or read a quality article within next Saturday using my contact form so that I can add them on Sunday.

Negative things keep happening to everyone. Do you get frustrated or do you try to find the hiding positive in the negative?

It is so common for people to face negatives. By negatives, I mean those things that you don’t want to happen. Let us focus on the blogging part of our life alone now.

Image: Optimist, PlanTrees by Heart of Oak

Scenario 1 – Broken Blog Theme

You start a blog and in just few days your blog theme doesn’t function properly due to some change you did in the code while editing your blog sidebar. Would you sit down and get angry over your blog? I know people who quit blogging because things don’t go their way.

What should you do?

Instead of getting angry at yourself for editing the sidebar, sit straight for a moment. Clear the fear in your mind. Login to a social networking site (me in twitter) or instant messenger and ask for your friends for help. Do what your (trusted) friend says.

The hidden positive

You know how to solve the issue that you faced. So now you don’t need to be afraid again when editing your blog’s code. Also you will understand how helpful your friends are.

Image: Optimism by baejaar

Scenario 2 – Comment Spam

This happens for almost every blog. It is funny how the spammers get to know about your blog before the search engines even index it. If your blog doesn’t receive comment spam, you can consider yourself lucky or your blog is not worth being in the internet. Okay maybe that is too much. Anyway, don’t get angry with the spam comments.

What you should do?

Install Akismet plugin for WordPress. If you still get many spam comments, especially from a particular IP address, block that IP address.

The hidden positive

See the spam comments this way. The more spam comments you get, more popular your blog is. In mathematical terms:

Comment spam is directly proportional to your blogs popularity.

The next time you receive spam comments, be happy that your blog got one step more popular.

Image: Money by jenn_jenn

Scenario 3 – A Big $0 Income from Your Blog

Blogs will not earn you money (a living) unless you get huge traffic. It won’t earn you even a penny when you are starting unless you are really good at it. I never earned a penny on the first day. Sometimes you won’t earn money after 1, 2 or even 6 months.

What you should do?

This is the tough period in blogging. Once you cross this, you will start earning money (I cannot guarantee a living). Keep your focus on blogging and do it as a hobby. This way it will never bore you when you are waiting for the numbers to appear in your paypal or adsense account.

The hidden positive

You will learn how not to quit when you are facing hard challenges in your life. It will help you keep going even when the target you want to achieve is so far from you.

Almost every negative has a positive. You should only be happy when you are facing a negative.

A negative can teach you a lot more than what a positive can teach you.

So keep going in your life looking for the positives in every negative.

Please share your views in the comments.