Social Software Explored

I know there are some really cool linking sites (I use Del.icio.us and clipmarks - but there are tons others). But what we don’t really find are really cool “travel to a link” sites. I am amazed at how I discover content on a daily basis. So much so that I am trying to write another topic “dampening the noise” but I wanted to take you through this trip I took today:

1) First I read my LinkedIn “Q & A for Product Management” - a saved RSS feed of any questions asked by people on LinkedIn dealing with Product Management
2) From their I found an interesting and timely question about Product Management and Agile Development
3) While reading the 10 responses I found one response that had a link to another timely blog post by Stacey Weber at Pragmatic Marketing (my favorite PM site)
4) While reading that I decided to check out their “Blogs” section where I stumbled upon (no pun intended) a whole slew of blogs that they recommend (in various categories)

After looking through this list for a while - my head hurt - I was completely overwhelmed by the amount of information so I had to quit. I stopped. Couldn’t go on any further - paralyzed by information.

This was all from one post in one of my 40+ RSS Feeds (each averaging 20 plus posts since the last time I read them)

We really need a better way to consume information…

Blogged with Flock

Blogging, RSS, What I am reading, communication, product management, time management

I am not talking about Matrix style information consumption (although that would be cool) but one of the biggest problems with the overload of information that we are in the midst of is that we are governed by old information presentation models.

Sentences, paragraphs, headings etc… have been the common tools we use to present information. Take a blog post for example. Very straight forward (I am shacked by the common layout formats myself). In most cases we present information on the Internet much the same way we would present it in a book.

We need to rethink this. Some will argue that we don’t present content in the same way that we do in books. They might say, “…but, Ron, we use flash and video and other techniques to get our points across”. They would be correct. Good content is delivered over the Internet using rich media, which is cool for those talented designers that can move in and out of Photoshop and Flash, the same way I do with a web browser.

But what about the rest of us. Those that can’t whip up nice graphics and movies whenever we want. How can we present information in a better way?

Robert Scoble thinks:

“We have too much great content.“

And Steve Rubel thinks that we are headed for an:

“Attention Crash.“

I think Steve and Robert are both correct. But what I think we need is a new way to communicate ideas. Not with text and lengthy paragraphs or run on sentences, but with something else.

I believe that we were headed here anyways. We add thousands of books a year (good books) yet on WordPress alone there were:

1,682,684 blogs with 15,713 new posts today.

We don’t need a fancy publisher to put content out there.  We simply write.  We are not reaching the amount of people that the Times Best Seller writers reach, but if you look at the world of content it is growing at an alarming rate.  The result of this is that eventually all of this “good” content will eventually go to waste.  Hopefully not.

If we don’t produce a way to “rip” through our “good” content in a faster way, we will miss the opportunity to truly capitalize on this great medium.

Blogging, Social Networking, Web 2.0, What I am reading, communication, society, time management

I have been thinking about this a lot and I am sure that I am not going to get this out in one post.  I am however officially fed up with E-mail.  I am so fed up that I am no longer going to refer to it in its supposedly grammatically correct form “E-mail” or “E-Mail” instead it will be called “The ill communicator”(email) for short.  It doesn’t really even deserve a hyphen.

I have been using a couple of other communication devices heavily over the past 6 months to a year:

IM - for both work and pleasure (but actually mostly work)
Text Messaging - mostly with my wife (who actually is quite fond of text messaging now)
Twitter - Ok don’t ask.  If you don’t know … I can’t help
Facebook - this is more of a time sync for me than any of the above
Blog - goodness it’s been a long time since I have been here

I have used Facebook and Twitter to get some feed back on E-mail.  Using the “Questions” application in Facebook I asked the following question:

“What is an appropriate length for an email?”

While I did not get an optimal response (only 2 people answered it) they echoed some of the sentiments that I have.

Too much text in an email equals 2 things:

1.) Delayed Response - if I have to sit and think for more than 20 seconds when I am reading your email then I am probably not going to respond quickly.
2.) No Response - it is quite possible that I may never respond to emails that are more than 2 paragraphs.

One of my friends sent me this link which I thought was interesting:

Rising Email Immunity Leads to Conflict in Email Etiquette

It was actually one of the most poignant Blog posts that I have read in a while.  It talks about the changes that are going on in the world around communication.  How we are soo connected.   I know people that sit on top of their Inbox and “wait” for emails to come in.  They feel like they have completed tasks because they responded to their email.

I spent 45 minutes at 9:45 tonight going through my emails for the day.  It is like extra work, on top of my regular job. When I read that blog post it was like right on.  Many times I think that when I respond to someone’s 4 paragraph email with a sentence that I am being rude.  In my mind there are better devices to have a “conversation” with.  Email should be used for quick things like “Did you get that email I sent” and “Are you going to reply to my email”.

I am not saying that Twitter is the answer, I just think that we are all going to get to the point where email is just not sustainable.

Social Networking, Social Software, What I am reading, communication, society, time management