Social Information Overload
May 28th, 2007Marry Hodder wants to know how to manage SIO. I just dumped a bunch of social stuff that I never used. My advice: Hold onto the core stuff. For me, it’s Twitter and Flickr. I’m not even on IM much anymore.
Posted in Uncategorized | | Top Of Page
May 28th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Not on IM? I think that’s the definition of “dead” online.
I’m just sayin’…
But I completely agree with you that holding on to the core is the only way to survive.
May 28th, 2007 at 8:32 pm
I had the same problem with too much current awareness in paper a couple years ago. My solution was to remove myself from all mailing lists, and start over building what I wanted/needed to see. That helped to keep things more manageable. I am careful what I add in now. I figured if there was something absolutely essential that I see, someone would either tell me or it would rise to the top and be mentioned everywhere in my random readings. Seems to have largely worked.
May 29th, 2007 at 4:31 pm
I figure this type of of information overload, in the phases that she is describing in her post, is just part of being at the forefront of technological developments - the “early adopter” people. She’s already thinking about getting rid of a bunch of social network profiles, whereas the majority of people are just starting to realize that social networks can be useful. The cool thing about being in this position is that you experiment with a bunch of things, see what works, dump the rest, and then the people coming along behind you see what kinds of things work best and go from there. I have over 20 profiles, just to see how the sites work and what they do. I actually use flickr for a few things, i’m starting to like Facebook, and Twitter is an ongoing experiment. I’ve also enjoyed making use of Kaboodle, oddly enough.
My theory is that the technology will catch up to our frustrations in the not too distant future, with widgets or code that allows for multi-posting from a single window - so that you can be where everyone else wants to be without having to BE everywhere.
May 30th, 2007 at 6:05 pm
This is exactly the sort of ’switching off’ that concerns me with information overload. There is a better yay… a personal filter could help dampen the noise and focus the signal.