Dealing with information overload
28 March 2008
Filed under Internet, Technology
How I skim my “high volume” feeds: information overload from Clint Ecker on Vimeo.
I’ve long thought it would be interesting to make a video of how people with tons of feeds skim them and pull out interesting information.
This is my “high volume” folder which holds posts from sites which post 10+ more items a day and which I could “mark all as read” and not miss much.
When I skim through these posts, this is how I do it. Each post probably gets less than a second to catch my attention. You can definitely see which posts get a bit more time than others. The one with the couple having sex was pretty interesting ;)
Related reading: RSS organization systems, how about you?
15 Comments
#1. Martin Gordon posted this 6 months, 2 weeks ago.
I don’t know how it doesn’t drive you crazy to give these blogs read “credit” for something you didn’t actually read.
I’m very particular about my % read count as it serves as a good indicator of what I’m actually interested in. If I only read 25% of the posts on a high volume site, then it’s usually not worth having to go through the other 75%, especially since I’m likely to find the most popular/interesting posts from that site from Techmeme, Google Reader shared items, et al.
#2. Clint Ecker posted this 6 months, 2 weeks ago.
Yeah, it was one of my only problems when I went to Google Reader. I was confused as to why it was saying I had “read” all these posts when a majority of them I’d only blown through.
I guess the distinction is that they are “marked as read” which isn’t really as granular as I’d like it.
I think it would be a cool idea for the Google Reader team to start a timer each time I hit a new post and if I sit on that post for more than x seconds, it is marked as “read”… like I really read the post and not just “marked it as read”.