Find Your Curators

There’s a lot of information flying around these days. It’s impossible to take it all in. On blogs alone, there’s 2 million new blog posts every day.

We can’t possibly do something with all that information. So how do you stay on top of new important things? How do you sift through all the junk to get the good stuff?

A new breed of curator has risen following the proliferation of information and ideas online today. It can be hard to find the good ones but when you do they’re a life-saver. Instead of sifting through hundreds of blogs to find the nuggets, let the curators do it for you. Many of the spend a lot of time online and are very knowledgeable in the area they’re curating. Let them do the work and you can just reap the benefits of the high quality information that’s left after they’ve sifted through.

Scott Hanselman talks about one of his favourite curators who saves him a lot of time, Robert Scoble.”I used to have 1,000 blogs that I would read. And then who’s the greatest blog reader in the world? It’s Robert Scoble, he’s always talking about how many blogs that he reads. So I finally decided, ‘I’m not Robert Scoble.’ He’s a freak, and it’s not healthy to keep up on that many blogs. So you know what I do? I read his blog. So I took the thousand blogs that I read and I pick five link blogs. I found my Scobles. And I read those five blogs and they give me an aggregated news.”

Tim Ferriss also has a version of this practice, he calls the Low Information Diet. He also calls it selective ignorance. He’s got a whole category on his blog devoted to the topic.

The gist of the Low Information Diet is that you only take in what you absolutely need to. Any information you do take in has already been filtered through trusted sources like Scoble does for Scott Hanselman.

So the next time you feel overwhelmed by trying to keep up with too much information, find a curator that will do it for you.