1. I often have people tell me they don’t understand Twitter. That’s ok. The same people sometimes say they don’t follow current events because they don’t know how to sift through the information to find what’s important. Well guess what? The two issues are related. More on that in #4.
2. I subscribe to hundreds of blogs via RSS, a technology that even fewer understand than Twitter, but which is more indispensible (less dispensible?). In Google Reader, I can see all the blogs I subscribe to, and I try to go daily, but sometimes I’m busy.
3. Lately, I’m busy with Twitter. Twitter has taken over some of the function of my RSS feed, just as it has taken over some of the function(s) of the blogs I read and write.
4. Back to the original point, and the advice I give to Twitter newbies. On Twitter,I have a done a pretty good job of assembling a group of intelligent, informed people who care about the same things I do. This is where I get the majority of my news, as well as pointers to interesting blog posts and articles. It’s great. I love it.
5. But my RSS feed has been getting neglected, which means I am missing things that don’t get tweeted from people/topics I care about. When I have a few minutes at my computer, I almost always go to Twitter, where I may have gone to GReader. I don’t mean for Twitter to take over my reading time, as these should be complementary activities. From now on, I resolve to set aside some time every day to read the blogs in my reader, in addition to my Twitter feed.
Q: Does anyone else have trouble managing the information coming at them? Have you neglected your RSS feed? What strategies have you employed to deal with this stuff?
