Information on the network is perpetually increasing in volume and so I find it progressively important to seek out tools that help me parse, limit, and control the flow of the information that is out there raging by like an enormous wordy river. I started my personal evolution in many places other geeks do – old skool with newsgroups. Since then, Usenet has been abandoned and shuttered and handed it’s info-river crown off to RSS and ATOM, which are ways of syndicating content from websites and aggregating that content in one framework. In a lot of ways, these systems are effectively joining the little rivers into a giant monster river that goes gushing by.

This is the first step. Anyone who attempts to put their head in this river only sees a blur as it rushes on by you, maybe you’ll get a hundred stories but the majority of it will pour on by without one iota of attention from you. This didn’t last too long and then the next step came, which was social curation. People follow other people and the ones who are the most popular are the ones curating the epic flow of information and bringing only the things you are really interested in to your attention. These social networks are like fishermen on the raging river of information, they catch bits and pitch them over their shoulders and they slide down the duct towards their followers. You don’t have to worry about the raging torrent anymore because you have faith that anything worth your attention is ending up in that duct running towards you.

Something really foolish happens next, you start to aggregate the ducts together and now you’ve got a smaller version of the giant raging torrential river except now it’s sorted, somewhat, but still rather too swift to catch much.

Then comes instapaper and all the other “read it later” services. When I see something that I sense may be interesting, usually by headline or keyword I will tap on it’s link and send it to instapaper for keeping. It’s as if the matchsticks in the raging torrent are getting picked out, then aggregated and the smaller torrent is being picked over by me and then serialized. The information waits, and I move through it item by item at the pace I am comfortable with. Now, the rate of information loss is immense. It’s meaningless to return to the giant torrent, the curators are just as noisy as the torrent is itself, the ducts might as well be the new torrent, and the tools you use are making uncomfortable squealing sounds under the pressure of how much we are effectively serializing.

Then as I read through my instapaper queue I finally reach the last point on the journey of raw information reaching me in the 21st century. Either I like it and archive it or save it in my evernote “for ever” or, and this is actually turning out to be a new theme, I brand the information TL;DR. It stands for “Too Long; Didn’t Read” and I find myself reading just a few sentences of what at first looked compelling and then realizing that either I don’t care or I don’t agree and then out comes the TL;DR stamp and the information is pitched into the big bit bucket in the sky.

There is something new coming, and I’ve seen an inkling of it with an iPad app named Thirst. It acts as a kind of content aggregator/curator for twitter traffic, another raging torrent of information and categorizes tweets and brings other content along for the ride. I think it’s really quite something however I can’t really make good use of it because my iPad is just too old for such an app, it jettisons after a few moments of use. Alas, there will come a day when we set up networks of aggregators and curators in spiral arrangements so that the final product is an intensely hyperlinked virtual meta-document delivered on some sort of display technology.

Something like this I find will really only work and make most people happy if we borrow a theme from email and arrange it serially like with instapaper. New material is always flowing into the queue but we can scan the queue, comfortable with knowing that nothing will go unseen, and able to give our attention to the stream of incoming relevant, curated, categorized, and hyperlinked information. Like a DVR helps people by timeshifting television information, whatever this new second or third generation information application will also perform the same duty.

Speaking of television, a great majority of it is TL;DW, or TB;DW. Too long or too boring. Perhaps we’ll extend it to TI;DW. Too inane; didn’t watch.

This blog post is already TL;DR, but at least I know it and celebrate it.