news

I helped a couple of friends move the other day and while we were taking a breather one of the guys mentioned how much more attention Michael Vick is receiving compared to OJ Simpson back in the mid-90's. On a quick reflection I agreed with him, but then, this morning, as I ran through my RSS feeds, I rethought my initial reaction.

Back in the 90's I had three main sources of information, the nightly news, the morning paper, and the radio. Given that I listened to music over talk, this meant I'd get a combined 4 OJ hits a day. Today, I no longer watch the evening news and I don't read the newspaper so my traditional media hits have cut in half (the 2 from the radio). However, I do follow three news podcasts which bumps me up to 5 hits a day. Then, when you add in RSS feeds from CNN, ESPN, CBS Sportsline, and the Rocky Mountain News, we're now at 9 hits a day. Add in 2 more on the average day from the news ticker on the Denver Newspaper Agency building and we're up to 11. My point is, there is just that much more information out there that is saturating our lives.

But, it's not just the amount of information that's changed in the past decade, the sources of our information are also changing. I ran across this post today which points out that Google is now indexing blogs at close to real-time speeds. And before anyone goes thinking this is only for blogs that are in the 1,000's of visits a day range, my blog, just like the example, is ranked as a 4 according to Google's PageRank system, which means what I'm posting now will be available via Google search within minutes. When you combine this with services like Technorati and Del.icio.us, it's not just an increase in volume of information but a dramatic increase of easily searchable sources of information meaning that voices that would have never been heard a decade ago are now just as accessible as the voices of the "big boys".

More info, more voices, more views ... how can we possibly process it all in a functional way?