How to deal with Infoglut? This was the question in our internal weekly microblogging chat a couple of weeks ago. Here are my tweets. Hope they make some sense without revealing the other parties. I fliped the order, so please read top down:

• compared to 30yrs ago the border between information media and communication media went away. That makes it so difficult and pressing to keep on top of the wave.
• You also have to distinguish between push and pull info channels. A library is ‘pull’ for example. You decide what you want to find, and you set the pace.
• e-mail is ‘push’. It is easy to get flooded by the steady stream of incoming mails. There you need special habits to keep up with it
• My RSS reader stopped counting at 30.000 unread items. Now I feel better. But the situation is ridiculous.
• Top 8.5 reasons why the new Google News sucks
• I have 5 twitter accounts. Both for sending other kinds of messages and following other kinds of people.
• Pros for twitter. 1) It is a pull-medium. It does not make you feel guilty if you miss something.
• Pros for Twitter 2) It is a communication medium, i.e. there is almost always a social story between you and the sender that adds relevance to the tweet.
• Cons of Twitter: there is not space to really describe a thought and reasoning. Everything is chunked by the silly technical limitation of 140 chars.
• I am interested if anybody has a clear notion of data, information, and knowledge?
• Good catch. So to rephrase your definition: You need knowledge to create information out of data. Is then Twitter (or any other medium) an info medium or data medium?
• I don’t know HootSuite, but in order to agree with you it must be a tool to capture and apply your knowledge to get the info out of Twitter’s data.
• First the question is how easy it is to find the right info wells…
• If you search for some real info it is easy to be flooded with data. It is quite time consuming to find the needle in the haystack.
• And one for the road: I would say Neil Postman’s statement “we are overnewsed by underinformed” turned into “we are overinformed but underknowledgeable”.     cheers, bye-bye -Matthias