infoarch

' Information overload is filter failure .' Most of us probably know this quote by Clay Shirky and agree with it. I do. It relates well to what I love about the web. There's information abundance, but the web is structured in such a way that we can pull information towards us that we find interesting. And push away things that are not relevant to us. There are great tools to help you with this.  Feedly is I think my core filtering tool. Twitter would come in second place. (It continues to surprise me how little people use an RSS subscription tool like Feedly...) I hardly ever read something right away though. This is where Pocket come into play. Pocket is where I save interesting online posts and article to read later. But - and this is where I'm interested in your experiences - I find that more and more there is just too much interesting stuff to read. My Pocket is completely stacked with articles I hope to read some day. And this is just the 'digital...

Some time ago my friend Ana Silva wrote a n interesting post about a very important topic: digital literacy . Please read her post (and the comments). The main point of her post is that we should not assume people get the internet or get social media and will start working out in the open by themselves. Some do, but many need to be helped. We have to teach them, step-by-step, to be digitally literate. This is hard work. I’ve written about this topic quite a bit as well using a different term: ‘personal knowledge management’ . How do we become more productive working out in the open and using the new (and old) social concepts and tools? As I wrote in a comment on Ana’s post, this is not a small issue. Recently the Dutch newspaper I read ( nrc.nl ) ran an extra section of the newspaper about ‘searching in a smarter way on the internet’ (Dutch: Slimmer zoeken op internet’). Very interesting stuff with all kinds of tips & tricks to improve the way you use the internet. But wh...

Oscar Berg wrote a blogpost about a short discussion we had on Google+ recently. In his interesting post he shares  how he consumes and shares social media . Over on his blog I commented on his post by asking him some questions about his strategy. But I thought I'd share my strategy here as well. I've shared my strategy in the past , but it has changed over the years. Here's my current strategy in one picture: A couple of remarks about the picture: I use Flipboard to interact with my Twitter Lists (3 lists) and Google+. I also consume the HBR-, National Geographic-, Vimeo-, and Instagram-feed there. I read interesting tweets right away or email them to my inbox to read them later. I view my Twitter search every now-and-then on Twitter.com. But will move that to Flipboard as well after reading Oscar’s post. I read my feeds in Google Reader. If I want to read a post I star it and make sure I find time during the day/week to read the starred items. When I know I’ll...

Talking to an old-aged man who had just discovered the internet, he said: "The internet is just so great, what a huge amount of sources we have there!" And I agree with him. The internet is amazing. The huge amount of content shared there about all kinds of topics. The way we can interact with content and people via the internet. The amazing number of different internet services. And we have reached the end of what the internet will bring us. But is the internet all good. There have been many that question if the internet is such a positive force. Shouldn't we question some (or all) of the changes the internet is doing to the world and to. Andrew Keen wrote about the negative aspects of the internet on culture . Nicolas Carr published about book about what the internet is doing to our brain . And more can be mentioned here. Recently I bumped into a review of The Filter Bubble in my Dutch newspaper , went over to watch the related TED Talk with the same title and ...

I've promised Bill Ives that I'd write a blogpost about Darwin Awareness Engine a long time ago. Finally, here's my post about this new and interesting service. Sorry it took so long... How do you keep up with the news, tweets, updates and feeds? We live in the wonderful world of information abundance. But many feel overwhelmed by the amount and speed of information. Some even talk about information overload. I described how I keep up with what's going on  in the world and in my area's of interest. But can't it be better? Yes, it can. This is where all kinds of new(er) solutions pop up. Like Techmeme and Postrank . There's even talk of Web Squared, Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web , which should help us filter through loads of information coming at us. Not just by highlighting 'the best tweets and feeds', but my semantically analyzing and summarizing the information. The Darwin Awareness Engine fits in this movement. And I think they're do...

When do you have enough information to make a next step or a decision? As you may know I love to process lots of information. Depending on the type of information I'll dive into it deeply or just dip my toe in it. After processing lots of information deciding when enough is enough has become easier for me. But it's hard for me to describe when I stop taking in information. Dave Snowden's Cynefin model has helped me in this sense. (By the way Snowden is currently summarizing the Cynefin model/approach/concept in several posts . The Cynefin model basically says: look at cause and effect. Is the cause and/or effect clear? Is the relationship between both clear? Depending on your answer different 'next steps' should be taken. For instance if the relationship between cause and effect is completely unclear. This is the complex domain. Probing is the thing to do. Don't go a read volumes of books and articles. Probe and see what happens, then act, etc. Even though ...

Recently I got a DM from @6things saying: "You are very interesting." That's always a great thing to hear. :-) 6things is a relevance engine , as they call themselves. They select 6 things per day in different themes as the most interesting things of that day. Now they are asking others to curate for one week. And probably because they find me interesting, I will be sharing 6 interesting things per day in the coming week with you. I selected the technology theme, so you can following the tweets with #6things_tech . Sharing starts tomorrow, May 23rd. Hope you enjoy it.

Do you have too much to read? I do have that 'problem'. I simply find too many things interesting. And the Web isn't making it easier for me with all these interesting posts, videos, articles popping up in my feedreader and in Twitter. I don't really perceive it as a problem though. I love the fact that all these different sources can be accessed so easily. But I do have to tweak my filter more tightly and take time to read. Another personal strategy is bookmark url's that seem to be interesting (after a quick scan) without reading them. I store them in my social bookmarking tool ( Diigo ) to read them when I need them. Bookmarking is my social filtering and storing machine. My extended memory. I store stuff that I actually read there (usually with highlights and comments) and stuff that I hope to read (or share) in the future. What is your filtering strategy? Do you bookmark stuff you haven't read?

Not too long ago I shared an idea I had. Wouldn't it be neat if you could follow a news topic? I wrote: Wouldn't it be interesting if you could just point to the article or video about the topic and say: subscribe to all articles about this topic. A topic-RSS feed. Of course you can do this for big topics, using hashtags in Twitter for instance. And you can also define a query and subscribe to that feed, using Google Alerts for instance. But for smaller topics it's not that easy. Or am I missing something? Or do you know of apps that already solve this problem? Well, it looks like some people at Google had the same thoughts. Recently Google launched 'Living stories' . The NY Times and the Google System blog ran articles about this new app. Currently it only works with news from two large newspapers: The New York Times and The Washington Post. But it relates well to my idea. Think about what this could mean. We could be able to point to an article ...

Chris Brogan's post inspired me to tell you about my morning work routine. Like many social media enthusiasts I get lots of strange and anxious looks when I tell them about the way I work and the information I process. They're even more surprised when they hear it doesn't take as much time as you would think. We'll here's my daily morning routine! Every morning, when I work at the office or at home, I open the following applications: Outlook (client or web) = work email. Usually I can go grab a cup of coffee before Outlook is ready to use... I go through my mail following the GTD flow and empty my inbox (inbox zero). All email that can be processed in 2 minutes (which is about 90% of my email...) is done right away. Other emails contains tasks which are put on my Outlook task list, or contain an appointment (and is automatically put in my Calendar). If a task has to be finished by a certain date I'll allocate a slot in my calendar to be finished on ti...

Some time ago I started using FriendFeed. I'd heard about it on the internet. I thought I'd try it when I had time. So I went over to get an account and see what it was like for real. The idea of Friendfeed is compelling: integrate all your internet streams into one stream. Friendfeed helps you read all your and your friends social media updates in one spot. That's exactly what I need. Before Friendfeed, I would check different sites I use, such as Twitter (or actually Tweetdeck), Slideshare, Diigo and Youtube. After setting up my account I had a hard time starting to use FF. One of the big issues for me was: who is on FF and who is on Twitter? And how do I import all my Twitter friends to FF, without duplicating? This basically is too difficult for most users, I think. I used the 'Twitter2FF' tool , which helps. I ended up writing down lists on paper to make sure I didn't duplicate and really have all my Twitter friend in FF. Furthermore some Twitter friends...

Filtering information has always been important, but seems to be ever more important in the networked world we live in. I'm experiencing this too. In no time I subscribed to lots of interesting blogs. And I love the way this can be done using a feedreader and RSS technology. But what to do when you have(?) to sift through hundreds of posts a day? Is there a way to help you decide what to read and what not? For this reason I thought I'd try Postrank (used to be AidRSS). And I must say it's been very helpful in several ways. Postrank ranks the feeds you get in your feedreader. It basically gives every post a number (1-10) telling you how popular a post is. This is nice. For me it doesn't imply I don't read post that have a lower rank. Sometimes these posts are even more interesting than popular ones! But Postrank helps me filter posts from blogs with loads of posts-per-day. And it helps me filter my Google Alert RSS feed. Lately Google Alert is giving me way to ...

As you know I'm a big fan of the ReadWriteWeb blog . They have a wonderful writers panel and cram out insightful posts regularly. Not too long ago a post was written about the next step in social media. It is titled: 'Why Filtering is the Next Step for Social Media' . The beginning of the post was hard to follow, to be honest. But I like the line of thought and agree with the last section: Filters are rapidly becoming a pertinent issue for developers of social media services. As a result, social aggregation platforms are in the perfect position to lead the pack. While this is no easy task and one that cannot be solved in its entirety, it would help resolve another issue social media users are facing: courtesy. Instead of being able to freely add whatever service you wish, some users like myself are taking into account what others may consider noise on certain services as a courtesy to members. In essence, you are becoming our own filter. You may refrain from important ot...