I went through an enlightenment last week when Google Reader told me that “From your 30 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 1,023 items, starred 3 items, shared 10 items, and emailed 1 items.” Over thousand items? (also, I actually emailed an item?) OK, I have five (news) feeds that put through more than 5 posts per day, but majority of those 30 publish below one post per day. That number was staggering. It can’t be all signal and I tend to skim most of the headlines and click “Mark all as read” on some of those high traffic news feeds, but that makes it worse actually – it means it’s just a lot of noise.

Twitter? Jaiku? All noise. Facebook. IM. SMS. Del.icio.us. Noise. Noise. Noise. N.oi.se.

People complained before how they didn’t have time to read their e-mails and how their inboxes were getting full. How on earth do they get their e-mails read today? E-mail has never been a problem for me as I only subscribe to one monthly mailing list and can always get my inbox to unread zero. I can also get my feed reading to zero on a weekly basis, which is only indicative that these feeds interest me. If I only clicked “mark all as read” on a feed, is it a feed I really want to follow? Apparently not.

On our Facebook group Jeremy told how he has set aside about an hour for blogging and how 15 minutes of that is spent only scanning the group. True, we are at a stage with this blog that we really need to think where we are heading, but still it made me think about the time spent with all the stuff and notifications coming everywhere. Is scanning through all that noise taking time off more important tasks? Suddenly I realize what’s so great about periodical magazines like The Economist. It’s pretty much all signal. Sure, there are many such high signal/noise feeds on my list like Daring Fireball, but even Gruber decided to mix things up by combining his linked list with his main article feed. Even when I was a paid member of DF, I opted for the articles only feed. Gruber’s linked list is good, no doubt about that, but the combined feed dramatically lowered the signal-to-noise ratio I so much enjoy. Fortunately I wasn’t alone and we got our article-only feed back (yes, this was in July, but the wounds run deep).

I know there are things that I’d like to know about when they happen and now what’s new. But I don’t want to follow everything like that. On aggregate the “what’s new” gets overwhelming. I rarely get past the page four on reddit without sheer exhaustion, even though I’ve clicked on only couple of links (and many [pic]-links, but those don’t count, right?). After what I can only say a healthy warning from Google Reader, I decided to cut back reddit too. The rate I consume the web was getting out of hand. There’s no way I could concentrate on that many items in that timespan.

Where’s Merlin Mann when you need him? On twitter?