Thinks I find along the way
Learn how to be a Google Reader rockstar! Join a free hangout at 15:00 CDST [GMT-6] today. Just add me to one of your circles and I’ll add you back and invite you…
I can talk about any aspect of this Google Reader mindmap you’re interested in!
“Information, if viewed from the point of view of food, is never a production issue. … It’s a consumption issue, and we have to start thinking about how we create diets and exercise,” said JP Rangaswami in his TEDx presentation.
For a man who currently has 38,000 books in his collection and lives in Calcutta, India where they are known for their rich, savory and sweet Southern Indian cuisine, his is a theory that could very well make sense!
Since most of us consume food according to a certain diet, minimize our surrender to sinful indulgences, measure our nutrition intake to make sure we have enough of everything; it’s possible that we’ve been doing the exact same thing all along with our consumption of data – or perhaps we should. As Plato the philosopher once said, “Knowledge is the food of the soul”.
“When I saw Supersize Me, I started thinking, now what would happen if an individual had 31 days of nonstop Fox News?” joked JP Rangaswami.
What do you think? If you saw information the way you see food, what would you do to digest the knowledge differently – nibble, bite, scoff or binge?” via How To Eat Information | FinerMinds.
Long before I saw this TEDx talk on eating information, my thinking on the topic was galvanized by Clay Johnson’s book The Information Diet which I highly recommend if you are intrigued by JP Rangaswami’s thoughts and are looking for more on the topic…
Me? I ‘eat’ information via Gmail, Google Reader and Gist and then share the best of it here and at business.toddlohenry.com, Twitter, Twylah, etc. Johnson’s book and Rangaswami’s statement about “Information overload or ‘filter failure’?” address the heart of the matter — just because I can track almost anything or anyone in Google Reader or Gist doesn’t mean I should in the same way that I shouldn’t eat everything I find at the Piggly Wiggly and I certainly shouldn’t eat it all at the same time! As the Apostle Paul said “All things are possible but not all things are beneficial” — tools without forethought result in poor tactics. Johnson and Rangaswami’s thoughts can help us ‘eat’ information on purpose instead of by accident…
If you want to ‘eat’ better, I suggest you need better thoughts, tools and tactics. One way to do that might be to read my free ebook on ‘personal news aggregation’. Register at http://elevation.company/pna/…
Peter Bregman posted this at Psychology Today…
I’ve come to the conclusion that I use email to distract myself. Whenever I feel the least bit uneasy, I check my email. Stuck while writing an article? Bored on a phone call? Standing in an elevator, frustrated in a meeting, anxious about an interaction? Might as well check email. It’s an ever-present, easy-access way to avoid my feelings of discomfort.
What makes it so compelling is that it’s so compelling. I wonder what’s waiting for me in my inbox? It’s scintillating.
It also feels legitimate, even responsible. I’m working. I need to make sure I don’t miss an important message or fail to respond in a timely fashion.
But it’s become a serious problem. When we don’t control our email habit, we are controlled by it. Everyone I know complains about email overload.
Email pours in, with no break to its flow. And like addicts, we check it incessantly, drawing ourselves away from meetings, conversations, personal time, or whatever is right in front of us.
Go to the source if you’d like to read the rest of his thoughts. I’d like to share with you a way that I have found to control my email habit…
Tools without thought or tactics are worthless so I try to remind myself that email is best used as a tool for ‘just in time’ information – information that affects relationships and revenue. All your ‘just in case’ information belongs in a virtual newspaper like Google Reader. Think of how much lighter your email load would be if you didn’t let newsletters and other detritus in? How often have you started down the path to Inbox Zero and then been waylaid by a Victoria’s Secret or Cabella’s catalog in your inbox. There’s a time and a place for that; the time is your ‘personal news aggregation’ time and the place is Google Reader. My advice? Use Gmail for email with a touch of Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero and David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’ and you’ll be an INBOX HERO in no time!
If you’re looking for help in this area, try my online book on ‘personal news aggregation’ or how to create your own personal news agency. You can register free at http://elevation.company/pna. Here are two recent lunch and learns I did on the topic of Gmail and Google Reader as well…
How to be an ‘Inbox Hero’ with Gmail…
http://youtu.be/hq5yksbplhE
How to be a Google Reader Rockstar…
http://youtu.be/6E-sP2kCf5I
Google, Gmail, Google Reader, and now Google+ are all a vital part of a content management and marketing for thought leadership system. I use Gmail and Google Reader for content management and Google+ for content marketing. Gmail, and it’s business version Google Apps for Business, are critical for managing what I call ‘just in time’ information — information that affects relationships and revenue. Google Reader is what I use to handle ‘just in case’ information like news and industry trends. Applying this approach to your content management will go a long way toward lightening the load in your inbox, but Gmail features like Priority Inbox, keyboard shortcuts, etc. give Gmail a clear advantage over other email systems, too. Google Reader allows users to create a virtual newspaper that delivers up to the minute reports on the things that are important to your world. Together these Google products are like the peanut butter and chocolate combination of content management. The cherry on top of the sundae is that these Google tools, like so many others, are available as excellent android apps as well!
The best thing about these products is that they are free, or have the appearance of free. Even with news like this report from Mashable, I still think these tools are a good value…
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1
Google+ is still an unknown variable in my content marketing world. I’m not happy with the way that Google is ‘forcing’ me to use it whether I want to or not, but I am gradually starting to use it as part of my content marketing plan. Sometimes I’m grateful that my social media certification course at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College forces me to be familiar with all these tools! btw, Google Reader is what I consider to be a ‘secret weapon’ for my work. I’ve done several posts on it — here’s a link to a series I did on getting content into and out of Google Reader that you might enjoy…
In the meantime, here’s a collection of the best content I’ve read on Gmail, Google Reader and Google+ in the past week:
[View the story “Trending topics in Google for this week” on Storify]
Still not convinced on the topic of curation? Read on…
Curation is now a necessity. The web is full of content. More than a person could consume in several lifetimes if all they did was sleep a couple hours per day and surf the web, life after life.
Google can’t help us with our internet A.D.D. Nor can Facebook or Alltop.
The best we’ve been able to do so far to harness the massive information overload is use tools like Google Reader and RSS feed aggregators like Alltop. They’ve helped, to be sure, but no one is going through all that information and picking out the best of the best and making sense of it all for you.
Rather than start a new site with the goal of creating a bunch of new content, it’s time for people to think about being content curators. Organizing and commenting on the best content around a certain topic.
Curators still use blog software to publish their content, but the vast majority of each post is made up of carefully reviewed and organized 3rd party information.
Jack Humphrey says it well here and I encourage you to follow the ‘via’ link and read his 11 reasons. Me? I am the self-styled ‘king of curation’ and my ‘e1evation workflow’ allows you to curate content better and faster than any other system I know of with maximum effect. Comment, call or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how this applies to your organization…
Internet marketer Jack Humphrey has curated some great content in a post called “The Content Guide for Bloggers” which I in turn, have curated for you…
“Content curation as a blogging model is widely misunderstood by most bloggers and marketers. Many people would tell you that curation is about finding and posting links of related material around a certain topic or keyword.
And they would be wrong if the goal was to get people and search engines to appreciate and react to said content. (And if your goal is to use curation as a means to get attention, then make money, from what you are doing.)
Real content curation is a set of links and snippets to other material on the web along with insightful, expert analysis provided by the curator.
There’s been an explosion of content on the web around “curation.” And new services that seek to make the process easier for different groups of users.” Source: The Content Curation Guide for Bloggers | Internet Marketing Consultant Jack Humphrey
In the model I teach my students, there are two main types of blog posts; creation and curation. Optimally, in my model, about 5-10% of my posts are creation posts. The rest is all curation. Why? Continue reading “Why curation rocks, part 1”
Here’s a post on one of my favorite topics. Save your inbox for ‘just in time’ information by sending all your ‘just in case’ information to your newsfeed reader…
“If you’re feeling overwhelmed with the sheer volume of email messages that hit your Inbox daily, try these new ideas that may help reduce your overall email burden without interrupting the incoming flow of information.
You may also want to check out Getting Email Under Control – a PDF ebook from David Allen where talks about tackling email using the the Getting Things Done methodology.” Source: How to Manage Email Overload with some help of your RSS Reader
I’ve done a 30 minute training session on how to use Google Reader and you can view it here. Give me a call at (920) 486-4798 or drop me a note using the contact from if you’d like to know more…
Bright, shiny objects! 
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