i find myself feeling this way about del.icio.us vs. diigo. I know that diigo offers me more options, but for right now, only a month or two into using it, delicious is good enough, and really changing the way I think about bookmarking.

I actually believe we are at a stage of the "information age" where too much information is available--"too much" because there aren't enough sophisticated (community-driven or computer-automated) methods of filtering quality from quantity. But it will get better, making tools like del.icio.us not just storage bins for potentially useful articles that I plan to read, but actually useful and used reference indexes.

Jared, I think you're right--even though I use a "to read" and a "blog this" tag to remind myself to go back to things on del.icio.us, I need something else to give me a nudge or to point me to info that I need. Not sure how this would work or what it would look like, though.

And Shannon, with the "good enough" solution, I think that one of the things that's going on is that when tools are really expensive and require a major commitment, then we're more likely to do research and evaluation. But social media tools have pretty low barriers to entry in terms of sign-up, costs, etc. so going with "good enough" seems somehow OK, I think. Of course, there may be hidden "costs" down the road. Like I signed up for Typepad a few years ago, before Wordpress really took off. It was reasonably priced and offered a lot of functionality I liked Now although I'd love to move my blog, the headache of dealing with broken links, etc. means I'm staying with Typepad, even though I could have a more robust system through Wordpress for less money.

One of the things that I've found with trying to introduce new tech, or a replacement of one app with an updated version, to others is that their definition of "best choice" and my definition of "best choice" are based on very different criteria.

As an early adopting gadget-freak, the technical implementation is very important to me. It is important to me to use a system that is good on the inside.

For many, though, there is little or no interest in how the "thing" does what it does, they just want it to do what they want it to do. If it does what they want / need it to do, it is the "best choice" for them, even if there is a "better choice" from a purely objective standpoint. (A special thanks to my wife for helping me learn that lesson.)

Kia ora Michele

There is nothing new under the sun.

Information has been burgeoning for a lot longer than 'list posts' have been around. In 1969, when I did my degree research reading from library journals, I was introduced to Chem Abstracts, not the present day Internet version but the tomes! And there were other similar publications. My fellow students and I swooned at the huge number of citations that arrived monthly that we would never be able to keep up with.

Most of us discovered that there were only a set number that each one of us could possibly pull out and read in any given time, and of course, we were all different in that respect.

So if the number that we could get through in an hour was 20 references, say, it made no difference whether we had 100 or 1000 or 1000000 new citations available to sift through each week. We could never do it all.

More often than not, within these thousands of citations were hundreds of cross-references which meant that the actual number of unique citations in any one list could be reduced significantly on the strength of the frequency of cross references alone. In fact this parameter was not a direct dependency - more like an exponential one - since the greater number of citations looked at, the greater the proportion of them were already cross-referenced with those in the sample.

It came down to strategies for sifting, and often this meant taking a statistical approach to our searching and sifting technique.

This rule applies to many different examples, ‘list posts’ among them . . . I think I’d better stop there!

Ka kite

Michele,
Thank you for your post, it made some things more clear to me, as I have been complaining about not stopping to read in the evenings, until I got too tired to write or even to internalize some useful "how-to" to apply with my students.

I realized that making my evenings shorter and my mornings longer helps me to stay focused on the real tasks and prevent me to get lost in the fascinating labyrinth of the web.

I loved the word "glutton" - it sounds so funny - in Portuguese we say "glutão" and it surely applies to this attitude of taking much more information than that we can actually cope with or turn into something useful to others.

I've also found Sue's post about how to post a photo duly authored, similarly pertinent and clarifying to me; in fact, I was delaying the duty to get effective instructions on this subject.

Thus, both posts, yours and hers, seem to conspire to meet my particular "educational needs" at the moment.
I sometimes feel like a sort of "My fair Lady of the Web" on her first steps, when she really had no manners!
Ines

Daniel, the visualization idea is really an interesting one--and it's VERY strange that I just posted on my tag cloud and then read this comment. I think you're right that using visualization tools is probably part of what we need to do to help people cope with information overload, although one of the challenges is finding tools and formats that work for people.

I'm working on a project using an assessment tool that supposedly evaluates people's ability to use graphics, tables, etc. to find information. According to the people using the tool, this is the skill area that trips people up the most, more than reading and math. Not everyone gets how to work visually, it seems.