I think the same may go for information; so-called information overload is perhaps likewise about better “information management,” and using tools and methods to organize information in better ways.

I agree with Bill Gates — on the general theme, at least, if not his solutions :-> — that today’s problem is not information overload but information underload.

Rather than theorize, I think it’s probably useful to get real-life feedback from those people who don’t find hundreds of RSS feeds the slightest problem — au contraire — and why, and who rather flourish in the new information-rich environment we have.

I have my 200 or so feeds delivered simply as one list with the latest first (I hate subfolders), which I can skim quickly to spot possibly interesting posts/articles/resources. I just right-click entries to open each in a new tab in Firefox; then its easy to quickly scan each individual item, and judge their interest. Some get read in full, others get skimmed.

But the interesting point is that with one click one can post the interesting items to Connotea, tag them in seconds, thus creating a personal archive; a continually evolving little subset of the web, with the tags organizing the archive.

This means that when I return to a subject, eg the use of geographical informations systems in disaster relief, I can easily find relevant articles I spotted earlier. Finding them is facilitated by use of tags in a Boolean fashion, in this case: all posts +GIS +disasters. See:
http://www.connotea.org/user/Declan/tag/GIS+disasters

An aside is that others sometimes also find these collections useful, as in essence you are sharing the effort you put into researching/watching a topic — see the Connotea refs in Kathryn Cramer’s Pakistan web links .

Another utility is that most of may articles in Nature, now carry a link to the relevant web resources collected through RSS and web searches. For example, for an article I wrote on electronic laboratory notebooks, all the web refs are public here.

With 102 refs, that may seem like a bit of the firehose, but for anyone interested in finding out about e-labboks, it’s actually a very select set of items, quickly skimmed, which can be an adjunct to the person’s own searches on Google or whatever.

Because of my long interest in avian flu I need to watch what’s happening daily, so I thought I may as well share my research with others, and use RSS to generate a sort of daily newswire that is a bit like a feed aggregrator except that I first select only those posts that seem interesting; see avian flu. This is firehose in the extreme, but again its easy to find all posts on a given subtopic of avian flu, say + avianflu +vaccines. But the main use here is temporal; many people just to the tag’s own RSS feed as an easy way of keeping up to date.

Without RSS there is no way I could keep track of so many sources, and I second the serendipity argument; without Connotea, there is no way I could manage RSS. Everyone has their own preferences and needs, and should go with what works for them. As someone whose job is about information and being aware of what’s happening, this sort of large-scale RSS handling works for me, but it might be beyond the needs of many others.

Declan