Quick Daily Take on the World ...

My daughter had an interesting assignment in a creative writing class recently ... the proposition was the ubiquitious nature of advertising of which a case was to be made pro or con .... she threw it out for discussion to which I replied ...

"Ubiquity can help one to implement selective focus… you learn from the constant and ubiquitous stream to discern importance and to focus on relevant and consequential products, services and ideas… in the older days, you would be wowed and that was that, mission accomplished… now because everything is WOW… one must learn to discern… that is not only helpful but can serve to create a better flow to life in a modern society where knowledge is everywhere, but wisdom is learned."

This led to an extremely lively discussion and a great paper (if anyone would like to read it, email me and I will send you a copy), which leads to today's post ... how to selectively bombard yourself to benefit from the ubiquity of information and yet not get overloaded to create brain lock .... here is my working flow (please use this as a beginning and modify to your own purposes as this is an individual pursuit) ...

Here is a shot of my Netvibes page I have found this is my basic sieve as I take what I consider to be good providers of information and it highlights for me any new articles that are unread ... from there I can simply click on any article and then I normally hit the read all button to then move all the articles to the read status ... this gives me an extremely fast way of scanning the feed but yet enables a much deeper read if I want (just another window away) ... then I will bookmark to del.icio.us the page with cross references for future digestion and deeper meaning. The page also provides a quick glance at my yahoo and gmail boxes, a little note section, and weather forecast for Makawao, Maui (pretty brutal lately). This one page gives me the quick view I enjoy to start my day and provides VALUABLE information as it occurs ... one area especially useful is the mindjet blog that has on more than one occasion given me helpful maps to work on and great papers for thinking. I like to read as much as I can, but because that can be spotty as far as time goes, this gives me a quick start whenever I can sneak a peak ... there is a new feature that I am going to use on the road next week to try and that is the boxnet storage ... file storage on the page gives me access to key files like the yahoo briefcase .... could be very handy ....