Too Much News: An Unfortunate Intersection of Human Nature, The Long Tail and The Tyranny of Choice

I just checked Google Reader (which I use in fits and spurts) and remembered why I stopped using it - about 4,500 unread items in about 30 feeds.  I'm going to invest some time in trying the different tools available for managing my news and information flow and see if I can do a little better.  However, I'm not sure the right tools are out there yet - they're all aimed at presenting flat lists of information in e-mail paradigm.

Lots of people have been thinking about the problem of "information overload" for a long time, in Internet terms.  Brad Feld in particular has been blogging on the topic for years; he wrote a good post earlier this year titled "I Need A News Feed For My News Feeds."

Josh Kopelman also wrote about the feed dashboard.  Together, Josh and Brad describe not just a feed aggregator, but a smart piece of software that can examine incoming information, determine if it's important, and take actions like filing it in a "read-later" folder, popping up an on-screen notification on the user's desktop, or sending the user an SMS.

I like Suli's solution: a webpage that has ten minutes' worth of news articles.  After you read it for ten minutes, it goes black and you can't read it again until the next day.  It's got a certain poetic simplicity.  "Ten minutes" (or about 2,000 to 4,000 words) is a small enough amount of content that it could even be done manually by a human editor.

That seems like a hatchet-style solution, but perhaps humans just aren't particularly well-suited to dealing with the increasing availability of information.  More choices has always led us to indecision (in my case, exemplified by flitting from news site to news site, reading twelve articles about the same campaign gaffe).  Seeing everything my friends are recommending in Google Reader is nice, but it just gives me more - and typically my friends are good for bringing funny videos and web comics to my attention, not news analysis that matters.

Until I or someone else fixes the problem, I'll try and lead by example: exercising restraint in information consumption, figuring out how to use available tools better, and sharing content other than funny videos with my friends (even though that sounds a little boring).