The noise of web 2.0
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?
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Interesting post. I think the definition of “signal” is very much related to where you are coming from. For instance, while I am an economist, there are only 1-2 articles max. (and often 0) in the Economist per week relating to my current food and retail blog and career-goals, and thus I leave a lot of them unread. Anyone want a nice pile of packaged economists?
I find Daring Fireball very entertaining, and for entertainment purposes, the signal vs. noise ratio is good. And I never watch the news, because I don’t care about Dutch politics, and thus that’s all noise to me.
About Merlin. I thought his podcast episode on “Kung Fu, Meditation, and Sexual Intercourse” was pretty inspiring. Basically, all this finding of a good system can easily lead to NOT get things done, and I think it’s all about the productivity. Once people have read Getting Things Done, The Now Habit, etc. there really is no reason to do anything except the work you’re initially trying to make more productive. And as you work more, you start developing your own productive routines anyway.
Think about the way people did it before the internet. They first went to school, learned some useless things, maybe went to college, and then they worked. And at work, they learned to work better. Today, it seems people spend more time learning about work than becoming better at work by just working more.
Sorry to sound so cynical, but it’s just how I feel.
You’re right that finding the “most optimal” way to be productive is usually the least productive approach, but that wasn’t my main gripe about the social web 2.0. I just started to feel that web 2.0 is about filling your web experience with as much noise as possible in fear of missing something.
I brought up Mann in reference to his “Inbox Zero”-movement. How to take control of the amount of stuff that you need to process. imagine that instead engaging in a conversation at a party, you’re following all the conversations simultaneously. I get this feeling when browsing twitter, my feeds and reddit.
The reason I used magazines as a counterexample is that the articles in them have always background, analysis and context. They are not so temporally sensitive as your average “tweet”. By signal-to-noise ratio here I’m more thinking about meaning than relevance, The Economist rarely has cryptic “EU is teh sux”-ramblings… =)
(If I was into Twitter, I would’ve just now written “I just remember again that I can resize input boxes in Safari 3 beta! What a freedom!)
Now that I think about it, why is the button in feed readers named “Mark all as read” as its rarely the case. A form of self-deception? “Mark unread as couldn’t care less” would be much more appropriate.
n.oi.se – what a word! And it’s so true.
Web 2.0 indeed made it a lot easier to share information and the result is that we get more and more of it.
And it will get worse! Think of the mobile web and devices like the iPhone or the rumours about a GooglePhone. E-Mails, Facebook Alerts and RSS will follow us on those devices always asking for attention and leaving us with the biased feeling of maybe missing something important when we turn those devices off.
And the long term future promises us something like the “augmented reality” where information simply is everywhere around us.
Is that what mankind wants or needs? Obviously yes….
@Kari:
Well there’s one line in your response, which strikes me as interesting:
“How to take control of the amount of stuff that you NEED to process.”
Do you read anything via rss that you need to read? I don’t. Read this piece by Dave Winer on why most rss readers are wrong.
As far as comparing the Economist to blogs is concerned, there is a big battle going on between what people consider old media vs. new media. Yet just because this battle is going on, doesn’t mean that all things “old” are wrong. Publications like the Economist are based on sound principles of publishing, editorial control, and a barrier to entry as far as publication is concerned. All of which also leads to a level of quality control, which simply does not exist in 99% of the blogosphere.
There is no clear educational system in regards to this either. How do you publish yourself? The majority of the how-to-blog guides seem to be focussed on how to get into a newsreader and how to get noticed, vs. how to produce quality content.
Right now the only answer seems to be readers voting with their feet, walking away from the qualitatively poor, leaving 100s of thousands of blogs collecting dust or writing for an audience of 1. And there seem to be 1000s of blogs which produce OK content, to which I include techiteasy and techcrunch, but there is no real quality-control there either. It’s just about the content.
As far as newsreaders are concerned, I have no clear answer, except that I agree with Dave Winer. I believe the focus should go away from “unread” content. And for the general media, I am a fan of aggregators like Techmeme, which seem to filter out most of the uninteresting stuff (no offence to anyone). And for focussed media, which is related to your profession, there just needs to be a kind of personal discipline, filtering out the crap and focussing on the essentials.
BTW. I should add that I never read blogs like Daring Fireball, Dave Winer’s scripting.com, or Kottke.org via rss.. way too noisy. I find it more comfortable to visit their nice sites!
…As well as BBC News. Best news-site on the planet, impossible to read through rss without going crazy.
Oh Man I can’t agree more !
I used to have RSS feed, this del.icio.us exchanges of links with mates, etc … and I just felt overwhelmed after a while so I gave up. No RSS feed anymore.
I once in a while goes to slashdot, the register or techcrunch to see the news. But I dont want these very news to put pressure on me.
I just gave up. What if i miss the news that Yahoo has bought this.com or that.net ? Big deal ! If that’s so important I’ll end up knowing it anyway.
Actually my concern as an internet user is not even Signal Vs Noise but rather Sense Vs Signal.
Besides, I’m not too crazy about this focus on getting more and more efficient (GTD, 43Folders). This just tends to contaminate everything you do, even out of your profesionnal life.
There this interesting column
in the register. I strongly recommend the read.
If I may, I made a post about it.
Kari, this is a fucking smart opinion post. Thx man, you’re putting in words my intuitions.
I get the feeling that there is so much info going around th einternet these days that we end up absorbing even less than when there was only a weekly local paper and the 6 oclock news to worry about.
I shudder to think what goes through the minds of Stumblers, for instance. Anything, nothing, something? Overwhelming.
Maybe that isnt very positive coming from a blogger adding to the morass of info myself, on a daily basis, but I just live in hope that when all this mad Web 2,0 paradigm settles down we get a sense of order and sanity.
FWIW, when I blog, it takes me about 2 site visits to work out a topic to blog about. I come from a teaching background where you learn to pick and choose info and build a lesson in seconds. If I subscribed to 100 feeds and took something from all of them, I could write War and Peace on a daily basis – not good.
Ed,
I tend to think the opposite : now that we have more and more information falling on us we need more and more people to make sense out of it.
Thats the reason why I strongly disagree with the ones pretending that blogging is dead.
3 lines post blogs linking to another story are dead as the author rather use twitter. Fair enough : I’m not sure anyone will miss those.
Thorough blogs offering different perspectives and sense just like Techiteasy does (hopefully), are definitely not.
Some notes on Twitter, as people seem to be condemning it as noise.
I find myself constantly adding and removing people until I find a right mix of signals. It’s kind of like standing in a group of people and telling the blabber-mouths to shut up for a second. Also, one observation: the people who seem most comfortable in Twitter are the ones that have blogged for a reasonable time and do so regularly. I find it a very natural place to be in, gives me room from the, usually longer, posts that I write. In no way do I see it as a replacement for blogging.
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Regarding this whole conversation, I think an interesting future post is on the structure of media 2.0. We are looking at very dispersed sources of information, and different types of structures that bring it all together again. All made possible by the power of RSS and Google-magic, and ultimately leading to interpretation of what a newspaper should look like.
From a personalised view: by bloggers who collect, publish, and discuss links; from a non-blogger view: by people who create pages of feeds in iGoogle, Netvibes, and Google-reader; and from a community-perspective: various interpretations like Techmeme, Digg, MeFi, etc. Maybe someone wants to tackle it? I won’t be able to for several weeks at least.
Btw, Ceciiil, I agree with you on the need for blogs. A big part of David Allen’s Getting Things Done and 43folders is making things actionable. A great way to make sense of all this noise is to write about it. Of course this leads to more and more noise… a vicious, but probably necessary, cycle.
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Hey Kari,
Based in Scoble’s review (http://scobleizer.com/2007/09/24/is-feedhub-the-answer-to-information-overload/), I’m testing Feedhub (www.feedhub.com) to see if it will help me manage “the noise”
Kari, check out this post by Nat Torkington on the Constant Partial Attention issue. This is brilliant stuff :
“Continuous partial attention is a post-multitasking adaptive behaviour. Being connected makes us feel alive. ADD is a dysfunctional variant of continuous partial attention. Continuous partial attention isn’t motivated by productivity, it’s motivated by being connected. MySpace, Friendster, where quantity of connections desirable may make us feel connected, but lack of meaning underscores how promiscuous and how empty this way of life made us feel.”
I also read a couple on r/w web about the attention economy that are worth a click (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/towards_the_attention_economy_opening_silos.php)
Cecil, thanks for pointing out me to Nat Torkington. I remember reading about Constant Partial Attention some time ago. I agree completely.
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