My twitter newspaper

August 14, 2010

For those of you who are not on Twitter – it’s a great resource for following interesting people and it has become my favorite tool for learning about things I am interested in – and connecting with people across the world.

On twitter my id is @gautamghosh and I tweet about HR, Enterprise 2.0 and Social Media related things.

I follow about 350+ people from across the world in these areas and others – and they share tonnes of links to very interesting content that I would normally never come across – leading to serendipitous learning.

If you’re not on Twitter you can still see what kind of content I am exposed to – thanks to this great web app called Paper.li which has created the Gautam Ghosh Daily

It’ll get refreshed every 24 hrs and arranges great content in a newspaper format.

It reminds me of Flipboard which is an app for the iPad – where you sign in using your social network ids and it creates a social magazine with the content your facebook and twitter friends are sharing.

Yes, these days increasingly our friends and contacts are our filters to the information explosion. The Google CEO stated that Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. That’s something like five exabytes of data, he says.

And yes we are creating and evolving filters to deal with this information.

David Weinberger blogs about a talk by Kate Crawford at the Berkman Center

Her study showed we are adapting to high levels of info while changing our definitions of focus, attention and productivity. This is not a technological problem to which there is a technological solution. Tech is only a means to an end And the tools and social norms are developing together.

Q: b[me] Does thefact that we are now aware of all that’s filtered out change our ideas about noise?
A: The filters are often social, through yoru friends. There are also filter elites — people who really know how to use these tools. Some of them are obsessed with productivity, and they are personal, individualistic.

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