RSSsssssssss

Last night while talking to a friend about RSS feeds, I had an epiphany (I never used to like the word "epiphany" but that is besides the point). RSS feeds are sort of like turbo-charged magazines.

I am a magazine junky. I subscribe to a few, buy them often, and sometimes eventually cut them to bits for art. I like the glossy photos, and the excitement when a new magazine arrives in the mail or I see it on the newstand at the store. They come once a month, or even every other month, allowing me plenty of time to enjoy the articles, pictures, and even the classified ads in the back. I can carry them with me, and read them in spare moments I might have throughout the day (very rare, but they do occur!).

Fast forward to RSS - a constant stream of information from all of your favorite websites...and then some. I have toyed around with RSS feeds in the past, and have a Newsgator account languishing around somewhere. It's probably blown up from being overstuffed by unread feeds. I find RSS to be a bit overwhelming for me, especially if when I didn't keep up with it. Some of the sites I selected spit out 30+ posts a day - AAAACK!

INFORMATION OVERLOAD!

The idea behind RSS feeds is great - keep up with all of the information you need in one spot, when it comes out. Rather than checking in at the various sites each day for new content, have it sent to you. Okay - I get that. But the truth is there are only a few sites I check in with every day, and I want to go TO the site - not receive the information in a sterile little reading window. Perhaps it's the equivalent of holding the magazine in my hands - I want to experience the site as it is designed to be experienced.

So I set up an RSS feed, and suddenly feel the pressure to keep up with it. No thanks. I suppose it would be useful if one was required to keep up to date on a particular topic, and needed to know what was going on right away. But here at work, and at home, I don't really find that to be a necessity. If it's really important - somebody will tell me. They can photocopy an article and leave it in my mailbox, or send me an link in an email. That way, if somebody knows me well enough they will know what it is I'm interested in...you get the picture. I've got my bloglines feed set up for this assignment, but didn't add much to it. A few "word of the day" sites, a site that tells me where in the world there have been earthquakes over 5.0 (note that both of those types of feeds have very small bits of information associated with them), and a couple of librarian sites. I'm not particularly impressed with the format for reading feeds though, and again, would probably be happier just visiting the sites when I want to.

But that's the great thing about all of these different applications, and getting to learn about them - we can decide what works for us, and what doesn't, and MOVE ON!

Now - before I go - a few things for you to think about with regards to information overload. I wrote an article in June of 2005 called Information Inflation (good heavens, was it that long ago?). Here are some statistics worth pondering, from the How Much Information? 2003 report by researchers at Berkeley:

Table 1.1: How Big is an Exabyte?

Kilobyte (KB)

1,000 bytes OR 103bytes

2 Kilobytes: A Typewritten page.

100 Kilobytes: A low-resolution photograph.

Megabyte (MB)
1,000,000 bytes OR 106 bytes

1 Megabyte: A small novel OR a 3.5 inch floppy disk.

2 Megabytes: A high-resolution photograph.

5 Megabytes: The complete works of Shakespeare.

10 Megabytes: A minute of high-fidelity sound.

100 Megabytes: 1 meter of shelved books.

500 Megabytes: A CD-ROM.

Gigabyte (GB)
1,000,000,000 bytes OR 109 bytes

1 Gigabyte: a pickup truck filled with books.

20 Gigabytes: A good collection of the works of Beethoven.

100 Gigabytes: A library floor of academic journals.

Terabyte (TB)
1,000,000,000,000 bytes OR 1012 bytes

1 Terabyte: 50000 trees made into paper and printed.

2 Terabytes: An academic research library.

10 Terabytes: The print collections of the U.S. Library of Congress.

400 Terabytes: National Climactic Data Center (NOAA) database.

Petabyte (PB)
1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes OR 1015 bytes

1 Petabyte: 3 years of EOS data (2001).

2 Petabytes: All U.S. academic research libraries.

20 Petabytes: Production of hard-disk drives in 1995.

200 Petabytes: All printed material.

Exabyte (EB)
1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes OR 1018 bytes

2 Exabytes: Total volume of information generated in 1999.

5 Exabytes: All words ever spoken by human beings.

NO WONDER YOU FEEL SWAMPED!!!