My Name Is Stowe, And I Am An Onfovore

I am not an infovore, obsessed with ‘consuming content’, using the old media terminology. I am actually something else: an “onfovore”. By this I mean two uses of the term “on”:

1. I have gotten to the point where I really need to be “on” — on the Web — to do what I do. I am constantly connected to a variety of online information sources. But I am not just passively reading, or watching.
2. I pass on a lot of stuff to others, every day. I create a stream of links, bookmarks, comments, and posts that are accessible to various ‘publics’.

An onfovore passes on as much stuff as stuff comes in, and must be online to receive and send.

An onfovore passes on as much stuff as stuff comes in, and must be online to receive and send.

One aspect of being an onfovore is that it is functionally impossible to do what I do without being connected, and optimally, being connected using the full experience of my favorite hardware and software.

Hardware:

• Laptop is MacBook, 13 inch unibody.
  
  
• External monitors - in VA I have a 23” and in SF a 30” external monitor.

Software: I run a number of programs nearly all the time.

• Firefox with a few addons and many bookmarklets. I could switch to Chrome, because I am not really very dependent on those addons.
• Snackr RSS tool — uses a ticker-tape streaming UI, so no filing: old stories just fall off the list.
• Tweetdeck as primary Twitter tool, with occasional recourse to Twitter’s web pages.
• Typepad for long-form technology blogging (like this).
• Tumblr for tumble-blogging (see ambivalence.tumblr.com and Microsyntax.org).
• Publish2 as a link journalism tool and which also can post those links to Twitter and Delicious.
• Delicious as a means to get links and comments posted daily to /Message.

There are a number of other programs that I run periodically, keeping up or seeing what’s breaking, like Techmeme (less so these days), Tweetmeme (although only once a day or so), various NY Times experiments like Skimmer, and TuneIn (Adam Hertz’s new start-up) which filters out media links from my Twitter stream.

Note that I don’t use other, traditional RSS readers, and I don’t spend very much time in tools like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, or the like.

When in the office mode, I run Tweetdeck on the MacBook screen, occupying all of it. On the monitor I have Snackr running on the right hand side streaming top to bottom, and then usually two or three FF windows open. But just listing these doesn’t really tell the tale.

The true onfovore is on all day, working the stream like an earthworm loves the dirt.

I get most of my links from Twitter these days, and principally directly from the 800+ people I am following. The first thing I do is to tweet “Good morning edglings!” and then read the NY Times online, as well as looking at the discussions and links that folks are posting on Twitter.

When I see an interesting link, or a link from someone that is interesting, I click through. In many cases, when the piece referenced is< interesting, I will create a bookmark or a post from it, and then push the link to this new material onto Twitter.

If it is about mainstream web business, theory, or practice, and worthy of a long form post, I use a Typepad bookmarklet to select text and the URL, and open the Typepad editor, and create a new post at /Message. Once finished, I use a Bit.ly bookmarklet to create a shortened URL to the story and to post a one-liner — a teaser — pointing back to my story.

So, the consistent thread is that the majority of interesting links find their way to me via Twitter, and everything I create, and nearly everything that I read that is worthwhile, is twittered out, again.

If if the original web piece isn’t worthy of a long-form response from me but still interesting, I will use a Publish2 bookmarklet to a/ create a Publish2 link, b/ create a Twitter one-liner, and 3/ post a Delicious bookmark. Generally, I write the Twitter one-liner and reuse as the Publish2 comment, as well. Note that my Delicious account is set up to post the last 24 hours’ links to /Message once per day.

So, people who want to follow my thoughts on technology could subscribe to my Twitter stream (which has the most varied and rich set of links), or only my /Message RSS feed, which is just my long format posts, my Publish2 links (if they are a journalist), or my Delicious bookmarks.

If a link to story catches my eye, but it is about politics or music, or anything else, I use different tools. If I opt to write more than 140 characters about Obama’s newest troubles or slide guitar techniques, that winds up as a Tumblr post on /Ambivalence. I use a Tumblr bookmarklet to start and edit the piece usually. I then look at the post, and create a bit.ly, just like with /Message posts, and everything is posted to my @stoweboyd account on Twitter.

If a non-technical link is just notable, I simply Tweet it by creating a Bit.ly URL and a one-liner, or simply retweeting it, perhaps with a few words of commentary.

So, the consistent thread is that the majority of interesting links find their way to me via Twitter, and everything I create, and nearly everything that I read that is worthwhile, is twittered out, again. Nearly everything that comes in — if I read it and think it’s worth others’ time — I pass on, with some sense-making of mine attached to it.

I average about 600 page views a day with /Message, somewhere about 20,000 unique vistors/month. I am not keeping tabs on the number of RSS subscribers these days, since I dropped using Feedburner. I am more interested in keeping track of the comments coming back from Tweets than comments on the blog. I don’t currently even have comments on Tumblr, since there is a different sort of sociality going on there (see Why I Am Obsessed With Tumblr, And Why That Matters).

I have over 8700 Twitter followers, and in the course of a day I may catch and thrown dozens of links, annotated with my personal spin on the events of the day. Very often I am retweeted, and typically the links I send out get over 50 clicks in the first few minutes, and often hundreds over the next few hours.

This is the life of the onfovore.

I can read mobily (mobly? mobiley?), but I can’t live the life of an onfovore on my iPhone. Bookmarklets don’t work, for example. So I am tethered to by laptop, and, of course, I have a data modem so that I can get on in a Taxi on the way to an airport, or in a bar waiting for friends.

The true onfovore is on all day, working the stream like an earthworm loves the dirt. So, it’s not about ‘consuming information’, it’s about transforming inputs into outputs, like a neuron in a vast interconnected network of onfovores, or the vertices at the edge of a sprawling web of connections each receiving and sending signals.

[disclaimers: I am an advisor to Tweetdeck, Publish2, Bit.ly, TuneIn, and many other companies in this arena.]

[Update: I realized this morning, 24 August, that I never explicitly used the term ‘onformation’ to denote the stuff that onfovores catch and throw, but I should have.]