Scoble’s “How I Read 1000 Weblogs a Day” Presentation
I went to Scoble’s “How I Read 1000 Weblogs a Day” session at NorthernVoice hoping to glean a few strategies about dealing with all of my RSS feeds from the guy that reads more of them than anyone I’ve heard of. I was disappointed.
The meat of his presentation boiled down to a 5 minute overview of how RSS works, and why it is more efficient than visiting weblogs and other content in a browser. If you’re already familiar with RSS, then he didn’t have anything new to share.
Scoble is able to read 1000 weblogs a day simply because he wants to. He wants to a hell of a lot more than I want to, and that’s how he’s able to do it. He doesn’t have any slick system (he uses NewsGator, like I do), and if the demonstration of the Tablet PC’s functionality is any indication, it slows him down rather than speeding him up. (Note, I have lusted openly after a Tablet PC, so it pained me to write that last sentence.) I realize speaking at a conference like that is a perfect opportunity to show off the Tablet, but it really did not work in this case. I came away feeling that the Tablet PC is clunky and difficult, and I’m sure that’s not what Scoble was trying to show. Next time, ditch the Tablet demonstration when speaking about a different specific topic.
What was most frustrating for me was to hear him apologize at the end of the session for having over 500 unread emails in his inbox. For a guy that purports to be an expert in dealing with information overload, this does not bode well. What it really boils down to is that he prefers reading his RSS feeds to reading email that is sent directly to him. And that’s a shame.
I’ve spent the past week personally lamenting the number of emails piling up in my inbox, but truth be told, I can get it down to zero pretty fast if I choose to do so. Anyone can. Scoble has mentioned David Allen’s Getting Things Done enough times that I know he knows how to, too.
The first rule of dealing with information overwhelm is deciding which information is most important to deal with. The rest is secondary, and can be removed from the equation if need be.
With that in mind, I would have preferred to see Scoble talk more about his linkblog, and how linkblogs in general can help humans to filter information for each other. Personally, I have been able to remove quite a few feeds that I wasn’t getting around to reading from my feed reader, knowing that if anything interesting pops up on them, they will end up in Scoble’s linkblog. He can’t teach anyone to read 1000 blogs, so instead why not show them how he can do it for them, so they don’t have to?
I think linkblogs have yet to mature into the indispensable tool that they eventually will become. If I could pay someone to read all of my favourite blogs and filter them down to the stuff I would most likely find interesting, I would do that. And I seriously doubt there is a technological solution for this; I want human judgement in the picture.
Next time, Robert, talk about that.