Tropophilia

Today I came face to face with a hard reality, and reluctantly bit the bullet.  I hovered my mouse above the “Mark All Items As Read” button in Google Reader, turned my head, cringed, and clicked.  When I looked back, my inbox was empty.  A feeling of both regret and relief washed over me, and I went back to work.

Yes, indeed.  This morning I declared “feed bankruptcy” in the face of an unassailable mountain of information. While enjoying my muffin and coffee, I had spent a good thirty minutes browsing through the “1000+ items” in my reader inbox.  Some posts I would skip, some I would skim, others I would read closely.  There were whole feeds — some with over two hundred unread items — that I defaulted on without even looking, preferring not to know whether or not I was tossing out any babies with the bath water.

That was hard enough.  I thought my thirty minutes of paring down had been well spent, and would have left me with perhaps a few hundred to skim and read later on.  Boy was I wrong.  What did the total item count read?  “1000+”.  Refresh?  “1000+”.  My inattention to the feeds due to recent travel and work schedules had done me in.  I was doomed.

I currently subscribe to 90 feeds.  Some are updated once a week, some once a day, and some once an hour, if not more often.  I’ve read that some people subscribe to 300, 400, 500 feeds!  How do they do it?  How do they pull the diamonds out of the desert of information they subscribe to?

Louis Gray wrote about this recently on his excellent blog.  He reviews a tool called AideRSS that integrates with Google Reader and ranks your items based on several factors such as Google search results ranking, Digg and del.icio.us bookmarking, and other variables.  (I’m going to download it and try it out, and post a short review in the comments later on).

But Louis claims that he doesn’t want a computer algorithm telling him what he should read.  Indeed, he revels in information overload.  I don’t know how he does it; he must just have a lot of time on his hands!

What about e-mail?  In a recent issue of Wired, Lawrence Lessig wrote about his experience declaring not feed, but e-mail bankruptcy, and shared his tips for how to handle it:

1) Collect the email addresses of everyone you haven’t replied to. Paste them into the BCC field of a new message you’ll send to yourself.

2) Write a polite note explaining your predicament. Apologize profusely - Lessig managed five mea culpas in as many paragraphs - and promise to keep up with your email in the future. Try to sound credible.

3) Ask for a resend of anything particularly pressing, and offer to give such messages special attention.

So what do you think of all this?  Do you lament that information travels so quickly and easily now that we have too much, and we’ll miss the real gems among the rocks?  Or is this phenomenon still a wholly good thing, it just needs to be better organized and managed?

I await your thoughts in the comments, but in the meantime I’m going to start doing some unsubscribing.  I want this morning to be my only experience with bankruptcy, digital or otherwise!

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user lordog.