Information on the Internet is subject to the same rules and regulations as conversation at a bar.
-Dr. George Lundberg
Chris Brogan wrote a post today called Reading Your RSS Feeder Is Not a Job, which makes the excellent point that staying current on dozens or hundreds of news feeds may not have a positive impact on your business or personal life. Unless it does.
When I talk to the business owners in my rural community, I think the problems leans in direction of not utilizing these tools enough. There needs to be more awareness of the information that is available through the use of online listening tools like Google Reader and Twitter. Most business owners have a vested interest in staying current with news in their field. I used to subscribe to weekly trade papers, which may have had two or three articles of interest to me in each issue. Plus, each issue had about a 30 day lead time, so it was old news. Today, I subscribe to many highly specialized news sources (blogs) and receive news with a much higher signal-to-noise ratio. If I limit myself to the same amount of news reading time online as I used to spend on the trades, I’m getting more and better information.
A common complaint about the the experience of reading news online is the absence of serendipity, that is, finding an article that you didn’t know you wanted to read. Enter Twitter, an absolute serendipity machine. If you follow people who have interesting things to say, about topics that you care about, you will have no shortage of links to follow that you would never had known about otherwise. A word of warning: don’t try and read every tweet (let alone follow every link) from everyone you are following. Think of Twitter as a stream of information rushing by, that you can dip into any time you want, on your schedule. If there are certain tweets that you absolutely don’t want to miss, set those people up on a list, so that they get separated out from the All Friends stream.
Take a look in your feed reader and Twitter friends list and make sure that they are organized in such a way that you can easily get to different types of information: business, personal or social. Then make sure that you keep a watch on those items that are relevant to your business, at least every few days. It’s a resource that you really can’t afford to ignore.
