Teach42

Dave Warlick says that he’s not a happy camper. Will Richardson says that he’s got too much good stuff to read lately. Across the bloggospehere, I keep reading more and more about folksonomies, tags, social software, rss, and xml. There is no question, we’re at a very interesting point in history.

We’ve moved from oral histories to the written word, from the written word to telegraph, from telegraph to telephone, from telephone to radio, from radio to television, and from television to internet. Internet began with the written word again, but with the speed and immediacy of telephones, radio and television. Then with the onslaught of high speed access, audio and video became integrated in. We’re still trying to figure out what to do with that piece though. Audio and video through the internet are relatively new technologies. However we’ve already moved beyond that. Syndication is now bringing the written word around the world at a rate unheard of in history. Syndication for the written word is barely a few years old, but we’ve now moved into syndication for audio. I’d bet money that by the end of the year, we’ll be seeing video syndication in a similar manner.

Who knows where we’ll be moving to after that, but one thing I’m pretty sure of is that we won’t be ‘ready’ for it. There are still people who are getting DVD players for the first time. Others still don’t have their first computer. Millions of people still use dialup. The reality is, even those of us who like to stay on the cutting edge can’t keep up with it all. So what do we do?

We settle down and decide what’s important. We pick and choose. We be more discriminating about what we read, watch and listen to. You can’t read every blog. You can’t respond to every post. You can’t listen to every podcast (unless you’re Adam Curry). It’s a skill we already have, after all we don’t watch every TV channel or listen to every radio show. In the past, we’ve never had the ability to do that. If you weren’t home, you missed the show. With the advent of Tivo, people can record much more, but what most people do is be more discriminate about what they watch. Same thing with podcasting. I really want to listen to more pdocasts, but I simply can’t. I don’t have the time. I make time for the important ones, or the ones I really enjoy, but I know there are other shows that I’d like to be listening to that I can’t. It’s the same thing with blogs. I can’t read all of them. I’m at a fraction of what many people read on a daily basis, but it’s so much information that I can barely digest it all. I constantly have windows open that I intend to blog about, but I just can’t write about them all.

So I’m trying to figure out how to trim down my bloglines account already. It’s not that I don’t want to read them all, it’s just that I want to spend more time thinking about what I do read. In some sense, it’s a wonderful problem to have. Like Will says, TMI. Too Much Information.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, it’s a wonderful time to be alive.

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