RichOakley.co.za

The problem

There’s just too much going on for web users. The situation is probably best summed up by a response I got after asking a friend of mine (who is far from a technophobe) why they hadn’t jumped on the Twitter bandwagon yet; “don’t I have enough f&%#ing things to update already?”. I’m starting to feel that way too. To count a few, I have Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter (along with Twitpic etc), Flickr, and Google Reader accounts, Feedburner email subscriptions, countless email accounts, and this ‘traditional’ blog. I’m pretty sure there are more that I’m forgetting. It’s getting overwhelming, really. But I think I’ve found the solution. For me at least.

This week: it’s all about how to deal with the overwhelming incoming information.

The answer

Aggregation. It’s as simple as that.  And here are a few steps to achieve it.

1) Use Google Mail

It’s your call whether you want to have your work and personal email in one place. I choose not to, though – I don’t really want to see the work I have to do the next day when I’m checking my personal mail at 1am, but that’s a matter of preference. What you have to do is get all your personal mail in one place at the very least. Google Mail allows you to download mail from your other email accounts, which is one of its most overlooked features. What’s more, you can, just by verifying the account, send email from addresses, too. So now all your (personal) mail should be in one place. I don’t even use Outlook anymore. With Google Gears, simply enable offline access and you can use it to compose mail, read downloaded email, access downloaded email, and pretty much anything else that doesn’t require an active connection.

Obviously, your Google account comes complete with Calendar, Docs, etc too. I’m not going to go into that, too, but they’re awesome tools. Best of all, because its all ‘in the cloud’, you can access it all wherever you are.

If you haven’t got a Google account yet (what?!), create one.

2) Use email aliases and filters

It’s easy for me. I’m using Google Apps on a custom domain which allows me to simply add aliases to a single Google Mail user account, but even if you’re just using standard Gmail, you can do it, too. A lot of people don’t know this, but Google’s incoming mail server doesn’t recognize characters after the ‘+’ character, but the search functionality does. What does this mean, though?

Say your Google Mail address is ‘yourname@gmail.com’ – you can create infinite numbers of aliases by simply adding a ‘+’ sign and whatever else you want after it. So, for example, ‘yourname+filter@gmail.com’. Mail sent to these aliases will still end up in your inbox. So what good is it?

Google’s inbox filter tools are a lifesaver, and using aliases makes it all that more easy to use. Simply set up the ‘to’ address in the filter wizard to be the alias you chose for that particular group of email. Now you can do what you want with it. Ever needed to sign up for something, but don’t really care for the compulsory updates? How about signing up with the email alias ‘yourname+crap@gmail.com’ and setting up a filter to send it all straight to your chunk mail. Or use Google’s mail labels so you can view groups of email at a glance, and even colour it.

3) Use these for your social networking site notfications

So you know that by default all those social networking sites you have accounts with (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc) send email updates to your email – that’s a bad thing, right? I don’t think so. How about, instead of turning off these updates, setting updates to go to, for example, ‘yourname+facebook@gmail.com’. Then use filters to label these mail. I hate logging on to find that I have an unread mail count of ‘17462’, so I choose to have them marked as read, too. Why log on to Facebook to check if someone sent you a message when you can view it with the rest of your email? Customize your notification settings according to what you actually care to be updated about.

4) Use Tweetdeck

So you have a Twitter account? And you have a Facebook account? Why not view everyone’s statuses in one interface. May I present Tweetdeck. It automatically refreshes and displays ‘tweets’ of all the people you follow on Twitter, direct messages, replies, and your friends’ Facebook statuses in a neat panelled display. Best of all, it’s a desktop app so you don’t even have to have yet another browser window open. When there are new updates, you can configure it to visually and audibly alert you, too. Get it at http://tweetdeck.com/beta/

5) Sort out your RSS feeds

Google Reader is a super tool – use it. If you’re anything like me you have a) feeds you’ve subscribed to in your browser itself b) feeds you’ve subscribed to via email updates c) those few feeds you’ve plugged into Reader. I think I have the solution now, though.

Firstly, unsubscribe from those endless email feed subscriptions. You just end up marking most of them as read, or deleting them anyway! Then decide which feeds you’re still actually interested in. Then add those to Reader. Now whenever you check your Reader account and happen to see something cool in Google Reader, and you may want to read it properly later, don’t star it, but share it instead (shift + S). Then set up a Feedburner feed of your shared Reader items. Add an email subscription to it and subscribe to it using that Google Mail address you created in Step 1.

So now, instead of getting endless email feeds containing a load of stuff you’re not interested in, you’ll receive a single daily email of all the things that you may actually want to read.

The result

It isn’t a perfect solution, but it’s definitely a substantial improvement. Instead of checking multiple email accounts, endless social networking sites, and suffering information overload in the form of feeds and unsorted email, you have essentially, using entirely free resources, aggregated  and organized most of your information.

Get the information you need now, and worry about the rest when you have the time to.

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Next week: Part #2 outgoing information: what to post where and how, and integrating ‘traditional’ blogs and microblogging services

In case you haven’t heard, there’s quite a bit of buzz at the moment about the journalistic or otherwise role of bloggers these days. How independent should they be and what rules, if any, should they play by? Paul Jacobson recently addressed the issue in his blog, and I felt I should add my two cents, too.

Essentially, the problem is this: Blogging started a few years ago not as an alternative to traditional journalism, but as something completely different. But, a few years later, things have changed. Quite a bit. Originally, everything that a blogger wrote was treated as opinion, really, and so an obvious and inherent bias was expected and accepted. Now, however, the worlds of journalism and blogging are merging, such that blogs are becoming seen as simply an alternative medium for which ‘traditional’ journalists and journalism can operate through. And so people are beginning to expect objectivity and ‘traditional’ journalistic ethics to apply. I’m not sure this should really be the case…

There are 2 sorts of bloggers; journalists who are simply doing their work online, and those bloggers who are not trying to be journalists at all, but just happen to be talking about much of the same things. The first should, naturally, conform to the ethics that would apply if they were writing for any other medium, as this is essentially how it will be treated by readers. And that’s what’s really important. To force the latter category of bloggers to do the same, however, would be a shame. The idea of blogging encapsulates the notion of an individual writing their opinion on whatever they feel most strongly about; and there’s no way to eliminate bias from that, or reason to want to. It is this strong sense of opinion and interest that drives blogging, and makes some more interesting than others. But where do we draw the line?

I’m not for one second suggesting that this inherent bias should go unmeasured and unchecked. Quite the opposite. It is the task of the reader to determine for themselves whether they want to take what is said as information, opinion, or just plain bias, but this can sometimes be tricky. A recent video post by our favourite goateed friend, Walt Mossberg, drew most of its comment discussion from accusations that a so-called review of the new Palm Pre was really a praise-singing of the new iPhone, by someone who is in Apple’s back pocket. Not only does this bring into question the worth of the Pre’s review, but also his general credibility. That’s not a good place for him to find himself in. But there’s an easy way to avoid situations like this, make readers’ lives much easier, and bring credibility back into blogging.

I think Paul has hit the nail on the head, in fact. The task for bloggers is not to try and eliminate bias. Not only is this a huge challenge, but defeats the entire point of blogging in the first place. The solution is to be completely openly biased, as unusual as that may sound. Instead of trying to pass Apple kiss-assing off as a Pre review, why not simply openly state ‘I have always loved Apple more than Palm. I own everything Apple has ever created. And, yes, they pay me to say that’. This way, when I get to the end of the review, instead of thinking ‘wow, that guy is biased’, I will instead be thinking ‘hmm…he did make some good points about why the iPhone will be better…maybe I should check out another review, though’. There’s nothing wrong with bias; as long as everybody knows about it.

So I’ll be starting my own ‘disclosures’ page, too. Unfortunately nobody is paying me to be biased, though. Yet.