Welcome to the infoslob blog
A brief note on the infoslob theme: I’ve been a bit of an information resource addict for several decades, starting with dead-tree resources, continuing across a variety of software product-focused jobs (e.g., I led product management for Lotus Notes and Groove Networks, many years ago), through several years as a software industry analyst, and generally as someone who tries to keep up with important world events.
I typically dedicate a couple hours each weekday morning to structured news scans, visiting a long list of web sites, Medium publications, and resources I track via Feedly (I confess I currently track more than 1,000 sources via Feedly, and that I also have no idea how many of them, with several left over from my Google Reader foraging days, are dormant…). I’ve been publishing a news filter-oriented blog during my morning news scans for ~20 years (the first couple years were pre-Blogspot; I have backup copies somewhere in my expansive collection of archived Notes databases…), in part to capture references to resources I expect I may want to revisit someday. My Reality Check blog has had more than 3.75 million pages views as of April 2019, which is gratifying but would probably be considerably less so if I had an easy way to determine how many of those pages views were from bots…
I’ll share some of my Amazon Kindle adventures in a future post; suffice it to say I have been a productive Amazon customer (and more recently also a big fan of OverDrive) and continue to search for an efficient way to organize the many Kindle highlights and notes I’ve captured since purchasing my first Kindle book in 2009 (James Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren, which I should probably block time to revisit…).
As I write this, I track 136 podcast shows via the Apple Podcasts app, routinely hit decision fatigue when I contemplate the number of video streaming options I have across my Amazon, Apple, HBO, Netflix, and other subscriptions, and generally struggle to make sense of all of the various information resources I consume on a daily basis.
Along the way, the collections of related documents, notes, and pages I’ve captured in Lotus Notes, Evernote, Microsoft OneNote, and Apple Notes are an embarrassingly large personal contribution to information entropy, but I still have the best of intentions of getting it all organized, one of these days…
In other words, I am an infoslob, but I aspire to become a recovering infoslob, and to share what I’m learning as I strive to be more mindful and purposeful in my use of information resources, in hopes of starting some constructive conversations about how we can more effectively use and share the ever-expanding paradox of abundance we have in resources, apps, and services.
My next post will share my impressions of Apple News, once I get my notes together…
