Bookworm

Know When to Disconnect

"In the roundtable discussion on "Consuming the New Media" that I took part in, Peter Beinart predicted that, in the future, the greatest luxury will be being disconnected from all the new technologies, freed to think new thoughts and come up with new ideas. So perhaps the most important idea to come out of this Ideas Festival, where everybody was walking around in-between sessions talking on cell phones or tapping away on BlackBerrys (or listening to iPods on hikes), was the thought that future bliss will be dependent on figuring out how to put the bloody things down.  After Beinart spoke, Charlie Firestone, the moderator of the "Consuming the New Media" panel, turned to the audience and asked Michael York, who had earlier given a presentation on Shakespeare, if the actor could think of any insights Shakespeare might be able to lend to the discussion. York, always ready, said yes and quoted Hamlet's final words: "The rest is silence." Leave it to the Bard to deliver the perfect topper." [The
Blog | Arianna Huffington]

How many RSS feeds are you subscribed to?

Going along with some of the "information overload" stuff I've posted lately, I was just looking at the folders full of RSS feeds I've subscribed to in NewsGator Online. 

Before I tell you the numbers and the various interests and fields I'm trying to track, the game plan is not that I will ever, ever read all of this, but that if I am interested in boning up on a particular topic, the feeds will be there waiting for me. 

Number of subscribed feeds: 299
Number of unread posts: 3895

These are primarily feeds for personal interest/edification, although there is a bit of overlap with work interests.

I have these feeds organized into folders.  The things I want to make sure to read often are in a Favorites folder.  Here are the rest:

Academic blogs
Art
Baseball
Book blogs
Business
Cartoons
Health/Fitness/Nutrition
House & Senate Votes
Humor/Gossip/Entertainment
Meta/or Multi-Author blogs (things like Metafilter)
Mommy Blogs
My Sites
New York Times
New Yorker
News/Current Events/Journalism
NPR
Photo Blogs
Politics (Left)
Politics (Right)
Productivity/Organization
Regular blogs (journal-like/multi-topic)
Shopping
Spirituality/Christianity
TV listings
TypePad/Blogger/Google
Weather
Work-related
Writing/Journaling blogs

What happens in practice is that the items in the Favorites folder get read and the others do not.  And I'm ok with that.  I'm such an information junkie that my "eyes are bigger than my stomach" -- I cannot keep up with all the information in the world!  It's difficult to keep up with the information related to my career and a few personal interests.  It truly is impossible to be "up-to-date" on everything.  This fact doesn't stop me from subscribing to 299 RSS feeds, though, does it.  ;-)

Information overload, anyone?

"The daily New York Times now contains more information that the 17th century man or woman would have encountered in a lifetime.  (Wurman, S.A. (1987)  Information Anxiety.  New York:  Doubleday, 32.)" [Link]