Cutting through the noise

I’m being a hypocrite, but I’ll do it anyway. I’ll BLOG about finding quality in the sea of junk and fluff that exists in the digital media. Everybody over-values their own opinion and the opinions of those who agree with them, and interactive media have allowed the birdsong of individuals’ pre-occupations to turn into a deafening roar.

A major day-to-day usability challenge that has arisen is filtering the stream of information so that we waste less time on bad or useless information. For connected people, lack of information is not the problem. Finding good information amongst the noise is the challenge. The right information is incredibly valuable, so finding it fast can be enriching and empowering.

I suggest a two-pronged approach:

1)   Find a reputable quality content provider.

2)   Find an efficient system for delivery to your eyes and ears.

A fast way to determine whether your content provider is generally high quality is to simply look at its reputation, but to obviously keep your critical senses about you.

In other words, do other people value it, and why? For example, New York Times is considered by many people, for better or for worse, to be a reputable news content source, as well as FOX, CNN and Al Jazeera. Ask yourself if you would value or trust content from these publications and whether it is because you think their work embodies good journalism or because they tend to agree with you. Watch the all of their feeds for a week, stick with one, and then think about why you stuck with it.  Also bear in mind that feeds like Google News take their content from all sorts of providers; they are not providers in themselves.

A major trend in establishing and evaluating reputation for content is social networking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon, which create an arena for members to quantify the value of content for each other.

To find an efficient delivery system for updates, articles and headlines, look for systems that allow you to customize how you filter your information as much as possible. The systems should also be flexible in terms of how they present the information to you, whether they flash it across the top of your screen, add it to a drop down list in your browser toolbar or text it to your phone.

At the moment, I use TweetDeck to pull friends’ Facebook status updates (which I’m constantly trying to filter) onto my desktop, and it can obviously do the same for LinkedIn and Twitter (although I don’t use those much, yet).  I use Adium to pull Skype, Google, Facebook and MSN into one desktop chat client so that I don’t have to be on all of those websites at once to chat with people.  It all comes together really nicely with Growl, which briefly flashes a dialog box in the top corner of my screen whenever someone comes online or updates anything from Tweetdeck or Adium. It also notifies if an application installer finishes building.  I rely on my wife to provide updates on the best Texts From Last Night..

Please comment if you have any good suggestions on systems that help people find good content and deliver it to our senses efficiently.