Showing posts with label Information Overload. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Information Overload. Show all posts

Saturday, November 08, 2008

Too much RSS ...

Do you use an RSS reader, like Google Reader? Do you know what RSS is? Basically, it's a way to scoop up all the postings from your favorite blogs and gather them in a single place. Each blog's new updates are called a feed; you use your reader to subscribe to feeds.

I often get carried away subscribing to too many RSS feeds. When my RSS reader tells me that I have "1000+" unread posts, I know things have gone too far.
So every so often , I just give up and delete all the unread posts and start over. In the stock market, there's a term for when the sellers accept the fact that market has bottomed out and stop waiting for an upsurge: capitulation. It's typically associated with with a horrible bear market. That's what the "mark all posts read" button is. Once, I even deleted all my RSS feeds. That's super-capitulation.

There were dozens and dozens of posts made in the 48 hours after the election. Most of them variations on this theme: "Obama won! What does it mean? What will he do now? Maybe this? Or this? Or how about this?"

I'm not trying to make any kind of political statement here -- this being a strictly nonpartisan blog and all -- but this was mostly low-information junk food. The actual news content was very, very low. Political reporting has become like sports reporting, in that reader interest exceeds new content by a significant margin. Hence the massive proliferation of commentary. In my line of work, I'm more of a "just the facts, ma'am" type.
So I junked all my unread RSS posts -- I capitulated -- and started over again. Deep cleansing breath! Ahhhhh ...