Thanks, khoa, for reminding me i had a blog!

Over the past year or so, I’ve slowly lost the urge to generate long-form content. It’s way easier to just tweet several times a day, “share” links via Google Reader, and comment on things in peoples’ friendfeeds or facebook posts. (i don’t even bother to add hyperlinks to things in my blog posts anymore! because anyone can just google everything. seriously.)

On the other side of the coin, I’ve been wasting more time on information discovery through these services than ever before. It got to the point where I ended up with 1000+ unread articles in my google reader at the end of each day, and this after spending an obscene amount of time wading through hundreds of articles every day. So last weekend, I performed a drastic feed-purge, unsubscribing from almost everything except a handful of sites, half of which are themselves aggregators, like Techmeme.

The only reason I felt like I could do this without falling to pieces is Google Reader’s awesome “share with friends” feature (“Cmd-S” for you keyboard-shortcut fiends). Not the part where *I* share things with people (though I do, naturally), but that I get to see what *other people* find worthy of sharing. Right now I only have about 8 Google-Reader-sharing friends (HINT, HINT!), but they have thus far proven to have excellent curatorial skills, so I’ve decided to experiment with relying mainly on these friends of mine to point me to the best of the web. No more wading through posts myself to determine what’s good and what’s not – I’ll just wait til others have done that filtering for me! (Side note: it may surprise you to learn that @levarburton and @mrskutcher have pretty decent signal-to-noise ratios, as far as celebrity Twits go).

[Huge Tangent: There's SO DAMN MUCH information available today that the "search" problem has long ceased to be "can we find information on such-and-such?" but rather, "What is the best information I can find on such-and-such?" We're going to rely much more on curation and recommendation to obtain useful information - Google itself uses human-mediated relevance algorithms, but it still falls short sometimes. Another question I find worth exploring further is that of pure, serendipitous discovery, specifically: will it become more scarce as we come to depend more on the recommendations of people we know (which implies less diversity, if more reliability) - or more, as we turn our eyes more often to unusual things because our trusted friends are the ones pointing them out to us?]

Anyway.

Of course, with all that time saved from not having to read every damn RSS feed there is, i will have more time to spend on Hulu. although truthfully, I already spend a lot of time that i shouldn’t be spending on Hulu.

I admit it, this whole computer addiction is getting out of control. (As my carpal tunnel-ridden arm squeaks, “Yes, it is.”)

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 @ 2:20 am computer
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