information_overload

I won't quote you a zillion statistics on the problem information overload causes. I'm sure it's one of the items on the Galactic Scorecard that the Federation of Sentient Species uses to evaluate progress. You know, rate on a scale of 1-5 the following:

• Plays well with others (didn't annihilate selves with nuclear bombs)
• Picks up after self (didn't dirty the nest with pollution or global warming)
• Is careful with lunch money (didn't squander finite oil supply)
• Learns well (managed to create an effective planetary data network)
• ...

The current spate of RSS feed-reading tools is missing a major feature: None of them (Bloglines, Google Reader, NetNewsWire, etc.) provide help with answering the major focus problem, "Which feeds should I pay attention to?" They are great at collection (one of the five GTD workflow phases I teach clients - gathering new feeds, and sorting them by source, date, number of unread, etc.) but that's just creating a bunch of haystacks. They still require us to laboriously look through each to find the needles (i.e., to assess value).