I find myself overwhelmed like many of you with enormous amounts of feeds, news and sites that I wish I could absorb in one sitting.  I have recently taken a different approach to get back some of my time and allow for exploring more.  Let's go into it.

First, there is the news reader dilemma.  I know there is specific content I always want to see and topics I wish I could find more on.  News readers like Particls take care of this for me.  I not only give it all my feeds to go and find, it also takes key word searches, and key word rankings, to go out and explore and find more articles based on my interests.  If I find I am not liking something, I can deny more on that topic, source or even blacklist it all together.  THink about this.  A newsreader that takes a topic and finds content and feeds instead of specifying feeds and hoping for content (much like you hope from me all the time).  Timesaving and absorbing new knowledge is the key here.  I have found some online readers that are trying to learn from you and they do ok.  But ok is not enough unless you can plug a feeder into my head at night while I sleep.  I need finely tuned, cleansed and accurate feeds in a timely basis.

Second there is self built alerts from items like Google and TweetScan.  Unless you can watch the public Twitter stream, you miss tons of good links and conversations.  Using such tools as TweetScan, I configure a listing of items to watch and each day it delivers me those Tweets.  I can then scan quick and see if I want to comment or even follow that person. Not only have I sparked good conversations, I find new people to follow based on topics they write about.  Instead of waiting for people to find me to follow back.

Social aggregators, or alligators.  Whatever you want to call them.  The large mouth of conversation as people tell us all about their entire life.  I did a nice piece comparing aggregation versus lifestreaming a while ago here.  My point is, people control what they put into the stream,. not you deciding.  So even with all the good stuff, as soon as someone inserts a site in their stream you don't like, you get the crud too.  We need an aggregation service which a person lists all their stuff and then let me pick from there.  A tuned and tailored information feed of poeple I want to follow.

Attention profiles.  Do they exist in the true sense?  How do they know what you attention is?  Are things you look at required for work or for outside learning? Attention profiles are a new area I am exploring so my opinion is lopsided right now.  I will refrain since I admit I need more practice before I speak.