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A Blogger’s Guide to Managing Online Information Overload
By Ramkarthik | October 6, 2009
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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.
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 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’).
Topics: How To | 6 Comments »
October 6th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
Good tips RK.
Subscribing to less blogs is definitely a good thing. Recently, I cleared some blogs from the list of 20 blogs I had subscribed to and now, with just 7 blogs in list, I am learning more!
And yes, the image is really funny!
October 6th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Hi Ishan,
I have currently about 15 blogs in my RSS reader. It not only gives me less content but also time to act to what I read.
Do you have any strategy to avoid information overload? Would love to hear from you.
Cheers
October 6th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Great post. I think we all suffer from information overload. We just don’t want to miss a thing. The tips you’re sharing with us are very useful. Another point would be to do things in moderation. – and set aside a specific amount of time to read blogs, emails ect…
October 7th, 2009 at 2:32 am
Luca,
I agree that setting time aside for reading blogs and checking emails will save you a lot of time. Planning always helps.
There is a saying that goes like this:
If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.
So true.
What else do you think will help in avoiding information overload online?
Thanks for the comment.
October 8th, 2009 at 8:05 am
Loads of stuff in my Google Reader. But I don’t feel harassed anymore even when the number of unread feeds goes up. So what? It’s not as if I’d drown from them, right?
We subscribe to feeds because we don’t want to miss a thing – news, analysis, trends, brilliant posts, humor pieces. Let them sit there. These are not going anywhere.
I’d deal with them at my own pace in my own time. One post at a time.
Besides my Reader is a great database of info and how-to and other trivia. I only have to hit search and presto – I have something to spice up my post with in terms of links, related reading across the web.
I use Feedly to prettify my Reader by the way. It’s got several attractive layouts that make reading feeds fun again. It’s got sharing functionality, too.
Love your tip about SU. Didn’t think of that before. Thanks!
October 8th, 2009 at 8:12 am
Jan,
As I said, everything I have listed here won’t work for everyone. This is how I cope with information overload and when I advised some of my close friends with these tips, they said they found it very useful.
You can subscribe to a lot of feeds.
And as I said in the post:
“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.”
It doesn’t work for me (like for many others). But I’m happy you are able to read every time in your feed and still take action on everything.
And glad you liked the SU tip.
Cheers