While agreeing mostly with Anne Zelenka in her post today, “A World of Information Possibility
” my impression is that she really states the obvious with her comment “think of watching a river rush by”. She’s specifically referring to how to best consume all subscribed news and blog posts. Supposedly, according to Ms. Z, there is just too much information and that “most of it is garbage”.
Now, I don’t think that most of it is garbage and if it is and you have a lot of it in your feed reader of choice, what does that make you? A garbage man (or woman)? We all subscribe to a sites feed only to later remove it when we become disillusioned about the quality (or quantity) of the content. Heck, I’ve removed feeds because I have found that the truncated posts did not provide me enough motivation to click through to their site to finish the read. Is that a source of garbage? Probably not. More like an irritation if nothing else. But not garbage.
Oh, and since my subscriber numbers are pretty much non-existent, my words evidently fall into the garbage heap as well. Not sure how one would ever get off the heap if what they post is all crap and no one is ever to subscribe to them, and their numbers never grow to the Scobleizer level.
Onward. My friend Eric Norlin of defrag fame 
has an interesting, short post about a new activity coming to be known as “lobbyconning“.
Now anyone who subscribes to the very non-garbage posts of Robert Scoble realize he spends vast amounts of money to attend conferences all over and seems to NEVER actually attend any seminar or speech, but just hangs out in the hallways. I’m going to have to go to one that he is at just to see if he even rents a hotel room 
.
Isn’t this sort of focusing of attention the same thing that Anne Z. is referring to in her post? Aren’t those who are lobbyconning simply choosing what part of the river they want to consume? I think so. And the water is more expensive from those rivers than from the readers (but I’ll assume the after parties are better too!)
Finally Nick Bradbury somehow got into my river of news stream (thanks to Scoble’s shared feed) with his talk about various feed reader applications supporting APML. Nick captures the sentiment of this post and its referrer posts when he states “I’ve long been convinced that RSS aggregators can help people overcome information overload by first paying attention to what a user is reading, and then using that information to make better decisions about what might (or might not) be important to that user.”
Admittedly, I have to learn more about APML and just exactly how it will help me to know what “everyone is paying attention to…” but clearly this will help to “uncover new and potentially important trends”. But will I have to do that? Or will there be a new wave of helpful garbage men women that will sort through the trends and help me to pay more attention to what I should/need to be paying attention to?
Very interesting day. And it’s just the start of the week!
