http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2008/10/twitter-zero.html

What I did start doing was putting in some pages in a regular review rotation that search for what I was doing in the near (and far) past, which has the effect of revisiting old discussions perhaps long after they happened, and systematically noticing more about how old threads played out.

Hmm, I don’t think what you propose (for friends who rarely update their blogs) would work for me. If I visited their blog frequently enough that they typically hadn’t updated, then I’d feel like I’d wasted that bit of time / mouse click, and would probably feel slightly resentful (“why did I bother coming here?”); I don’t want to feel resentful towards my friends.

And if I solve that problem by increasing the time between visits so that there’s almost always something in their blog, then I get the interesting time lapse view; but it means that I’ll be talking about whatever they were thinking about weeks or months ago, which makes it harder to have a conversation with them. (And with other people who read their blog.) And it means I won’t get to check in with them as often as I’d like.

Having said that, I’m quite willing to believe that this methods works better for you than it did for me. And I agree about posts from occasional posters being a bit jarring in my feed reader; I’ve managed to deal with that to my satisfaction, but it is a tension.

Ever since they were WAIS servers and LISTSERVs and GEnie groups, I’d go through a period of covering a lot of ground (call it “exploration”) and piling every feed of conversation and recorded knowledge in one sorted place. A folder for the RuneQuest stuff, a folder for the bioinformatics stuff, a folder for the artificial life stuff.

Whether we’re talking about Gopher or RSS, quickly one finds that most—if not all—of the “feeds” are languishing, dead. So then one prunes: save the space and attention by purging all the junk that’s never touched, or full of spam, or noisy. Focusing on the high-utility sources. Call it “exploitation”.

And back again.

I think what’s qualitatively different now is that we’re applying this approach to whole modes of communication, not swathes of one medium. I’m not reading RSS feeds of things now, but am watching more of what people post in my del.icio.us network and Twitter friends list. Less attention to (for instance) the XP mailing list, but more attention to the Pragmatic books.

In starting Not An Employee, I think most of us are finding that face-to-face conversations are more crucial (by far) than any discussion or marketing online.

What we’ll have to see is whether Alan’s and Ed’s and my retrenchment persists, or if we start using simply shift again to some new feed that engages us more. Is face to face always better than email, or just a fad?

For example, I have coding (reddit, etc), AI, trading, fun, science.

By clicking each group, I can get in the right headspace for quickly scanning these. I then click through to each website as interest strikes.

It’s a fast way of covering a lot of ground, and inspiring myself in ways that if I had to manually visit each website, I wouldn’t necessarily see (particularly since a lot of the information comes from sites I never knew existed — it is, after all, how I found this site).

However, I do think that getting the NUMBER of feeds as close to zero is very valuable.

Despite my continued efforts in this direction though, I won’t be removing yours