tom willerer . com - Quality vs. Quantity: I want both!

January 7, 2009 at 1:14pm
Home

Quality vs. Quantity: I want both!

With the avalanche of information coming at us from twitter and facebook updates, RSS reader news items, emails, phone calls, text messages, etc. many people have one of a few reactions:

I can’t keep up but I try and thus I’m overwhelmed
I can’t keep up and I don’t try thus I ignore most of the information
I can’t keep up, so I limit the # of blogs / people I follow to the minimum

These are among a few responses to this dilemma and they are all legitimate, but none satisfy me.

I want to know that I’m keeping tabs on all of the information / people that might (potentially) matter to me without getting overwhelmed by all of the information AND I don’t want to just ignore anything I can’t yet find time (or mental space) to focus on.

So what do I want? I want both the greatest quantity of information / people possible, while being able to only read the most quality / relevant updates and information at any given moment.

What’s needed are better ways for us to find information online. And better ways for us to aggregate information online. And better ways for us to keep up with our friends online. In my opinion finding a lot of quality information online is still in its infancy, and I can only hope it gets better before I resort to one of the 3 tactics outlined above.