Scanning the media is key to creative thinking
I've been advocating Twitter and Friendfeed as being the newest critical tools for timely data gathering. The most common criticism of these new broadcast media is the noise level - enduring irrelevant conversations while scoping for a nugget of usable news.
ReadWrite explains why the noise is good for you. I concur, and add these reasons why I believe in noise as a part of the creative process
- Opportunities unexpectedly present themselves. Stumbleupon is a good example of an application that presents interesting sites.
- Expands creativity. Passively presented data is registered in the mind and summoned later in context as an "aha" moment
- Although "drinking from a firehose" is the opposite of a meditative approach to digesting information, both styles of thinking process are required for any kind of strategic analysis.
- Noise filtering requires efficiency - don't get addicted to constantly monitoring Twitter feeds, adopt a skimming style to find news and data applicable to your livelihood.
- Noise tolerance depends upon the individual. I just happen to enjoy being wired in all the time.
I completely agree with you that if you cut out all the noise you are restricting your ability (and opportunities) to find new interesting things. I have been thinking about this very idea for some time, especially as it relates to the blogosphere.
I don't think folks monitoring the entire global conversation is efficient or healthy (trust me I know from 1st hand experience on both counts). So some level of filtering is needed, at the very least so you are not inundated with information overload let alone crap information overload.
I actually started a project about 8 months ago to create an efficient way to digest real estate industry commentary, reporting and opinion in the real estate blogosphere (I found this article with it). The result is regator.com and will be going into private beta in the next week or so. I started with just real estate blogs but it worked so well we now have over 200 categories (and Real Estate is still well served). We are provisioning more/new servers today, but hit me up for a private beta login if you are interested.
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Interesting opinion. I was always discouraged by the noise level of the social networks. Here in Vancouver">http://jaybanks.ca/vancouver-real-estate/">Vancouver real estate web 2.0 tools are still not very popular and I think whole Canada is a bit behind US realtors. I started using some of the social networks recently and I think it's very challenging.
Best wishes!
Jay
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Great Post, I had no idea about blogging and such thanks
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