wtscils598x08

I used to think that having a feed reader will mitigate the problem of information overload since I can be more selective about the stuff I read. I monitor over 100 blogs and it's almost impossible to keep up with them. I've become used to unread items numbering in the thousands, and I'm only taking cursory glances to pick up stuff to read in greater depth.

Because it's so convenient to collect feeds, whenever I come across interesting content, I won't hesitate to subscribe to its feed. Over time, I began to realize that I'm spreading my attention thinly over an ever-growing pool of feeds. It became much harder to pick out quality posts worth my time. It's like digital photography. With film cameras, people took time to compose their shots. Today, we've become trigger happy with our digital cameras, snapping photos with the hope that at least one shot will turn out well.

These days, I hardly add new feeds to my feed reader. I'm more selective about subscribing to new content. Rather than filtering stuff myself, I'm relying more on feeds from sites like Digg and StumbleUpon to do the filtering for me especially for popular posts. I no longer subscribe to blogs like Gizmodo and Engadget which churns out more than 100 posts a day!

I don't think aggregators mitigate or aggravate the problem of information overload. They may make the problem more manageable by filtering stuff that we're not interested in, but that's not going to affect the overload in any case. With the explosion of user generated content, there's now a greater need to filter items in our feeds. That's something that aggregators can't do for now.