Always Documenting, Never Reading

I'm impressed by the number of ways there are to catalog one's experiences. There's Flickr for the photos of the recent party you visited last night. There's YouTube for posting videos of your pets doing funny things. Then, there's plenty of sites with user review sections like CitySearch where you can write a review of the new Thai restaurant you visited last week. There's forums like Craigslist where you can discuss the ins and outs of your hobby. And, you can journal your day-by-day life on your weblog, your video blog, and via podcasts. Heck, there's even ways to quickly record every thing you do in your waking life, with a mobile device and a service like Waymarkr.

With all of these cataloging options, where or when do you stop and read the information, not just your own but from others? I don't consider myself a proficient poster, yet I'm perpetually behind in reading the feeds I'm subscribed to in Bloglines (much like the stack of New Yorkers that taunts me from my bedside nightstand). With a handful of proficient posters' accounts, I don't see how someone who regularly records their thoughts, pictures, and videos online has time to read and view them all, and still have time to live the very life worth cataloging.

A big thing in the business world these days is roll-ups, or dashboards. Quick summaries of lots and lots of business data (sales, earnings, traffic, feedback) in easy to consume charts, graphs, and green/yellow/red key performance indicator displays. This approach (with the right heuristics behind it) can tell you which region is suffering with low sales, or which the most efficient factories are, or what the highest-reviewed product is, at a glance.

The world of blogging could take a page out of this book, and produce a way to view someone's collective blog/picture/video/audio output in one view. The idea isn't to zoom out to the point of seeing detail-less thumbnails and abstracts of what people are posting on their blogs, but instead to help me quickly see the salient bits of what someone is thinking, doing, and cataloging, and to help me focus in on what I want to read.

Not a month goes by without some newspaper, magazine, or blog writing about information overload and information management. Typically, solutions are along the lines of partitioning time and information, in order to see and deal with less at one time. I'm of the opposite belief; more information is great. Just give me a zoom slider so I can spend less time figuring out what to read or view, and more time reading and viewing it.