With the onslaught of information now on the web it takes a lot of time to keep up. I’ve tried to count the number of sites I frequent on a daily basis. I’ve narrowed it down to about 20-22 sites. That’s a lot, but well below the global average. The Nielsen//NetRatings say the average web pages viewed per person in the month of April was 1,450! And that’s down 6.72% from 1,554 in March.
That’s a trend that I can relate to. I’ve been visiting site after site, looking for ways to reduce the number of sites I read. You can see where it’s a losing battle. I’m sure you’ve felt the same way at some time.
My quest for less has lead me to newsgator, Google Reader, google alerts and Factiva 2.0. All these sites are an attempt to read mainstream media like the NY Times, BusinessWeek and USA Today, and to monitor the traditional media mentions of FedEx. I read Fark and Digg for my miscellaneous information and deadspin and a couple of other for my sports news. Yes, I still read the old papers for news, but use blogs for sports—I can’t take Peter King talking about Brett Favre any more!
I then added Facebook and Twitter and revived the LinkedIn account to my information gathering routine. This all added up to my first participatory dip into social media – other than my first, short-lived blog – News Mueslix “Reading the news everyday keeps you regular”.
Now I have FriendFeed, a Tumblr account, tested Flock, am testing Yoono and used Twhirl. With all this information coming at me it’s all pretty difficult to manage, remember and learn.
So, it’s back to the basics for me—good ol’ RSS. I’ve spent some time re-tweaking Google Reader to collect my FedEx searches from the blogosphere, Summize and news searches. I just feel like I’m missing something.
I’d be interested to hear how you keep track of everything and if you wouldn’t mind sharing there are major karma points coming your way.
MC
1 response so far ↓
Jas // August 6, 2008 at 7:17 pm
Hmm, seem to be coming into this web 2.0 late. Flock and/or yoono seem like safe choices, yet I have so many RSS feeds I abandoned Google Reader because I couldn’t keep up with the onslaught. The new mac at home and my windows laptop at work help remind me to seperate the two. Since I am almost rid of my hotmail and yahoo email accounts, along with going paperless, wonder if I should spend my time investing in FF3 with a million plug ins. Where is the aggregator of aggregators?