The information saturation point

This will happen to you eventually, if it hasn’t already.

A while ago I reached the point where I’ve been reading the blogosphere long enough to identify sufficient numbers of really smart people blogging about stuff that really interests me, that more is published by them in any given hour than I can actually read in that hour. I’m inclined to call this my “information saturation point”, where I must forever give up on being able to absorb all the information I would like to absorb, because it appears faster than I can read it. Filtering out junk is no longer sufficient. Even filtering out boring is no longer sufficient. I have to filter out the interesting stuff, and that’s hard.

Now, I’m not a real fast reader, and I do have rather a lot of interests, but I suspect everyone is going to hit this point eventually, simply because the volume of posts on any given topic is is constantly increasing, and the net helps you find more topics to be interested in, while the available daily reading time of the average human remains more or less a constant. Skimming, and simply learning to read faster, will only get you so far.

Tool support gets you a bit further, essentially you can skip a lot of waiting around for pages to load by using an aggregator. And you can start aggregating across areas of interest as well as across interesting bloggers. Unfortunately this will tend to help you find more interesting bloggers that you don’t have time to read.

So I just don’t use an aggregator at the moment, it would simply be too much for me. Every now and then I experiment with one, mainly because I’m interested in what the state of the art in aggregation is. I skim the headlines at web20workgroup every few days, and I read Stowe’s blog because it’s always good, but that’s about it. I’ve got a startup to start, so reading blogs is mostly off the menu.

And I certainly can’t keep up with the books I’d like to read, I have an amazon wishlist about a mile long, but I’m not buying them mainly because my reading capacity is more or less already completely satiated by the internet.

But on the whole, it’s a nice problem to have. Better this than living in the 17th century when your written information intake over a lifetime might fit into one edition of the New York Times (as someone said recently, can’t recall where)