South Florida Inbound Marketing Blog

Information Overload and Social Communication

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Nowadays everybody seems to be preoccupied with the amount of Information that we get every second of the day, specially with the advent of social media, 13 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute, it will take you 412.3 years to view every video, the are over 13 million articles available on Wikipedia and over 4 billion photos archived on Flickr.com and this doesn't take into consideration the countless number of blog entries everyday.

Ever since the library of Alexandria we have had information overload, but information is power rather than a distraction, we just need to learn to filter it, based in our interest and needs.

One tool that you should be familiar with is RSS, and if you are not, it is time you learn about it.

RSS stands for real simple syndication, if you are collecting and reading information from 20 to 30 different sites and you go to some of them in a regular basis, wouldn't it be great if instead of you going to those sites, they could come to you when there is new information? Can you imagine the time you will save by not visiting all those sites to scan information? And all that information delivered to you on a standard view.

All what you need is an RSS reader application either web or desktop based and a list of feeds that you want to subscribe, add them to your reader and you are done.

There are several RSS reader applications out there, but if you are just starting and want to try it, I'll recommend that you use Google Reader once you do that you can check the sites that you normally visit for an orange icon like this one , it indicates that the site provides an RSS you can simply click on the icon and follow the instructions to add it to your RSS reader.

Another beauty of the RSS readers is the fact that you can create folders to organize your feeds by areas of interest.

Go ahead; take it for a spin, once you try it you'll find that it is a tool that certainly will help you save some time that you can dedicate to more productive things.

Photo Credit:    http://www.flickr.com/photos/25031050@N06/ / CC BY-SA 2.0