A World for the Indecisive

Tim Elliott is taking this week to run an experiment and read only Scoble's link blog and Techmeme.  He wants to compare the two, and see how they stack up to each other.  I think that this is an interesting idea, but fairly pointless.  While there was a time when you had to decide choosing between two sources of information, that world is quickly leaving.  You no longer have to sacrifice one thing in order to obtain another.  Today you can get a whole multitude of sources of information all for free and all very quickly.  Thanks to RSS and feed readers you don't even have to go to different places to find all your news.  If you find a source that has good information, just subscribe to it.  Today the only thing that you need to invest is time.  While that may seem like an evermore valuable resource, the truth is that it doesn't take much time to increase the volume of what you look at.  When you have a "river of news," as Scoble calls it, you can quickly scan over a ton of stuff.  When you see something that catches your fancy you read it, otherwise you just keep going.  Without having to take the time to click through to different pages, or different sites, you can consume an incredible amount of information.  This means that it really doesn't matter which provider might have marginally better news than the next guy.  As long as they have something that is worthwhile, you can just throw them in with the rest. 

Just to clarify, I do think that there is an importance on the quality of information you get.  You just don't need to be as picky when it comes to having multiple quality sources.  Instead of having to decide which great publication gets your subscription dollars, you can just get them all.  By this means, you can cover a broad range of topics and sources, and get a better overall picture.  It does not mean that you should just read everything, or apply no filters at all, because there is a lot of crap out there.