Two tips to avoid information overload on the internet

Information overload is affecting more and more of us, as we register for yet more websites which promise to change our working life/give us more time with our families/do our jobs for us. No one tool can ever live up to such grandiose promises, no matter which tech luminary is endorsing the next big thing. Still, you can definitely save yourself some running around circles with a bit of savvy attention to detail and some initial time investment.

Twitter

The first complaint I often hear is that people keep missing tweets from people they’re very interested in because they get lost in the noise generated by other people they’re following. The best way to resolve this is to set up lists, a service that Twitter has offered since the beginning, but few people seem to trip over. Instructions on setting them up can be found on the Twitter website and can be quite time-consuming, but it is worth bothering with.

Essentially, you can create a list called News, add everyone who tweets news such as @bbcbreaking to the list, and then if you only want to read tweets that contain news, you go to your list on Twitter by going to http://twitter.com/<yourtwitterusenamehere>/<yourlistnamehere>, so if I wanted to go to my news feed list and only see tweets from a news source, I would go to http://twitter.com/loulouk/official-news-feeds. Once you have set up your lists, you can add new people to these lists as you go. As an addendum to this, it is worth noting that if you use Tweetdeck, it is possible to create any number of columns based on lists.

internet

The second complaint is that people see links in tweets they’d like to follow, but they are reading Twitter in their lunch hour or during a quick break between meetings, and they don’t have enough time to follow the link and read a full article. After all, Twitter is supposed to be short, sharp messages. This is where the “Favourite” button comes into its own. If you favorite a tweet from anyone, even someone you are not following, it can be recalled at any point by going to http://twitter.com/<yourtwitterusernamehere>/favorites, so if I wanted to view my favorites, I would go to http://twitter.com/loulouk/favorites (Note the US spelling of favorites). Once you know about favoring tweets, it suddenly becomes a lot less overwhelming to keep up with the links people share on Twitter. You can always come back to them later – days or weeks later if necessary. Again, Tweetdeck offers the functionality of creating a column based on your Favourites.

RSS

Of course, not all information comes via Twitter. Emails arrive with links, for example, and people write interesting and relevant content in blogs. In fact, in a world that is moving as fast as ours is, following the right blogs can mean a quick and easily digested overview of the new localism bill instead of wading through the whole thing. Plus, you’ll get opinions, interpretations, and feedback that are no longer the sole remit of think tanks and professional journals in the new consultation age.

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If it is your job to keep track of what grassroots are thinking as well as senior management, blogs can be fantastic; but if you regularly read more than a few blogs each day or week, checking back manually to each blog to see if it has been updated is going to wear thin quickly. This is where RSS can be your friend. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (a title some would refer to as the Trade Descriptions Act), but once understood, it corrals all your reads into one place, highlighting in bold new posts from all the blogs you follow, which can be a real time saver.

There are guides to setting up your RSS reader all over the internet, but the BBC provides a beneficial one along with a list of all their news feeds – it’s not just blogs that allow you to RSS their content. So there you have it. Two easy steps to getting the information you need when you need it. These are just a couple of examples of the tools available to help you control your information, but if you’re experiencing a particular problem with digital information, why not comment below? We’ll do our best to help.

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Writer. Pop culture buff. Certified alcohol trailblazer. Tv nerd. Music fanatic. Professional problem solver. Explorer. Uniquely-equipped for working on Easter candy in Las Vegas, NV. Uniquely-equipped for analyzing toy monkeys for the government. Spent a year testing the market for action figures in Minneapolis, MN. Spent high school summers donating walnuts in Phoenix, AZ. Earned praised for my work researching human brains in Orlando, FL. Spent college summers writing about pubic lice in Washington, DC.