Umair Haque on Getting Stupider

Umair Haque is worried that a steady diet of tech.memeorandum is making him stupid:

[from The Problems with 2.0, pt 34514]

I luv Memeorandum and all it's reconstructor cousins. It's one of the first things of my reading list. It's hugely slashed my search costs in finding new stuff.But there's a problem. Ever since I've started using it to the point where it replaces many of my other sources, I have gotten stupider.I can feel it - I don't think as fast, flexibly, or freely.

I persist in spending at least half of my reading time wandering around, for that very reason.

Aggregation a la tech.memeorandum is great for finding out what people are piling on, but bad for finding new, oddball, errant nonsense... and we need a reasonable admixture of that goo or we get stale, cobwebby, stupid.

The same reason that you have to get out of the RSS reader: too much same old, same old.

tags: umair+haque, tech.memorandum, aggregators, rss+readering

Comments

[Christopher Carfi]

>The same reason that you have to get out of the RSS reader: too much same old, same old.

Stowe, spot on. More thoughts on that here, via "newvoices"...

http://www.socialcustomer.com/2005/07/the_newvoices_t.html

[Laurence Timms]

Heh. My 'interesting stuff' engine chuquet.com is *meant* to show you what everyone is piling into right now, but I've got to admit that oddball errant nonsense nevertheless appears. Near the top, too.

Weird, because I didn't intend for it to do that.

Now you've said it, though, I can see how it'd be useful to have leftfield stuff appearing in the midst of the 'normal' stuff. If I ever work out why the chuquet.com algorithms are doing what they do, I'll try to make sure that they just keep on doing what they do. If you know what I mean.

[Bernard Moon]

Completely agree. After being a Bloglines addict, at the end of last year I started accessing it once a week. I wanted to read the posts by actually visiting my favorite blogs and see if I find random nuggets of information. With the aggregators, such as Memeorandum, I just glance through them for similar reasons, and it seems a lot of people are just posting to be recognized on these types of sites. 2006 is staying old school blog reading for me :)