I’m sure it’s different for everyone, but we have so many sources of information coming at us. I make myself more available to them, yes, but even if I didn’t you still have email, TV, radio, phones, tablets, books, music and the Internet. So even if you’re not seeking it out, I think it’s finding us and as such we’re integrating it into how we live and learn. Me, I’m an ‘Info Freako’ and go out of my way to marinate in it all.

As for authorship in comments. That’s an interesting question. I don’t think Google supports fractional authorship on one piece of content. How it will deal with it when validating via the Rich Snippets Testing Tool … well, lets find out!

I’m still finding a happy medium. Facebook surely isn’t it, the fact that carriage return submits a comment ensures the brief Twitter like response.

So far, Twitter search and G+ are my primary resources for content discovery. Been a fan of Google Reader Play for a long time but that content is now very similar to what I see on G+.

Side note, what happens to authorship if I apply the appropriate code as I have in the signature here? Just food for thought.

Thanks for stopping in and leaving a thoughtful comment. As I mentioned, I want services like KAI and others to succeed. In fact, I think for some users they probably do a decent job. And with some tweaks maybe they could be a more effective tool for my own type of information consumption.

I might be an outlier or perhaps the canary in the coal mine. I’m not sure which. I spend way more than 10 minutes a day consuming information. Part of the reason why is that I’ve seen clear benefits in doing so. That, and I enjoy it. Again, that might make me unusual, but I think people are learning how to process the accelerated flow of information.

An improvement (for me) would be far more diversity, to go beyond my social graph (no matter how many levels you’re following) and follow the links within some of those articles, or to map the engagement graph through those who have commented, shared or bookmarked that piece of content. Follow the conversations to multiple platforms. What do those people look like? What are they reading?

But there’s also a fundamental difference (which I’m not sure I communicated well enough in my post) which is the the non-linear nature and juxtaposition of content that can produce different insight. Services like KAI would be hard pressed to insert what seemed like random things into those updates.

These could be images (perhaps you could map a service like Pinterest), songs (perhaps you could tap into Spotify), videos, books or even food. I’m reminded of the back of Wired Magazine where they’d list the songs that helped get that issue out along with food and drugs of choice. (I’m not sure they do this anymore.) I was always interested in what they listened to because it would clearly influence how that issue was produced.

The type of cut-up method I describe transforms things. So my recollection of the 80s game Simon might encourage me to think about design and UX in a sightly different way that day. So perhaps I’m being too harsh on services like KAI. They do what they’re supposed to do and have a place in the ecosystem. In the end, I think I see them more as a piece to a greater solution rather than the solution itself.

However, what we’ve focused on more from the beginning is what you are most likely missing. This includes personalized content through recommendations, content from quiet people (hidden gems section) and different media types. This is our first attempt at avoiding the echo chamber.

Lastly, your process of skimming headlines may be effective in surfacing only that content your likely to care about, but I’ve found it takes too much damn time. If it takes you 10 minutes to scan articles in order to read 5 minutes worth of content, I’d like to reverse that ratio for you. It’s not about filtering out data, it’s about resorting it in a way that is likely to save you time. It’s all still there, just organized outside of realtime.

Thanks again for the post. And even though KAI isn’t solving your overload problem yet, we’ll get there =)