Where do you get your daily dose of information from? Are you a news junkie watching the news on TV all hours of the day? Do you go to CNN every hour on the hour like clockwork? Do you subscribe to blogs? Personally, I’m not a local news or politics junkie. I will glance at CNN maybe once a day. On the other hand, I am obsessed with checking the blogs that I follow. I check Bloglines about 5-10 times a day. I get more information and stay up-to-date on tech happenings from following blogs than anywhere else. Plain and simple – there isn’t a better place for me to look for information on startups, entrepreneurship, tech companies and new technologies than the blogosphere. Sometimes it may be hard to find relevant blogs when you are first starting out, but that’s where Technorati and some of the other blog search tools come in. Honestly, you don’t need them as much as you think. Once you find a few good blogs it’s easy to find other good blogs by perusing their blogrolls. For those who don’t know, a blogroll is listing of blogs that the current blogger follows or links to. I have found most of the blogs that I follow using this method. It almost comes back to that saying in “Lucky or Smart” that A players hire A players. Good bloggers will follow other good bloggers. So find a few good blogs and you are all set.
As for the future, we consume all kinds of information everyday of our lives. From blogs to TV ads. Everywhere someone is trying to get our attention. As the Internet, grows and more people contribute content there is going to be a natural evolution. How we consume and distribute information must change. There is to much information on the Internet right now. Imagine 10 years from now? Honestly, in terms of search technology I think Google is a relatively good tool compared to the marketplace. Notice, I mentioned “relatively good”. In all reality, it sucks! When I search for something on the Internet I don’t need or want 1000 results – let alone more than 1000. Give me 5 results and make them the ones people actually thought were useful. I know – this is a very very tough problem to solve, but someone will eventually solve it. Also, search is only one aspect of information consumption. Actually, I’d rather only use search for special cases. I’d like to get content pushed to me based on my interests. In that case, you need super advanced filtering mechanisms (not email filtering) almost a trust-based system. Anyway, the point is that our time is very valuable and shouldn’t be wasted on sifting through useless information. Applications and services need to be built to do this for us. We need “smart” analysis services. As the Internet evolves and standards are implemented we should see a shift in this direction.
Quick disclaimer. The project that I’m working on is in the same arena as to what I’m discussing above. Stay tuned for more info.
