I noticed a phenomenon in myself that I thought was worth taking note of: green post overwhelm. There are so many green blogs out there: Lime.com, GreenBiz.com, WorldChanging… on and on. I used to remember more of the names, because I was subscribed to them, but I got overwhelmed by all the posts. Even with the ones I am still subscribed to: GreenBiz.com, and WorldChanging.com, there are so many posts each day that I have to sort of “brace” myself before I check them.

So, I think there is actually a market space here for channels that give less information. I think the art of attention management is going to get more and more prominent.

This opens up a whole new area of possibility, which for the moment I will call minimism, or the art of deliberate extraction. I don’t even know what I’m talking about–but there’s something to it:

• While there’s just way too much information to ever process, we are still pumping it out as though there were a shortage.
• Everyone wants their information to get out there; let’s say that is natural.
• Our biology still predisposes us to pumping out as much information as possible, as though there were a shortage of it. I remember when my mother told me that you could die of drinking too much water. At first I didn’t believe her, but then I realized that it was probably true.
• People are just beginning to develop technology such as RSS feed aggregators that allow us to sort through this information.
• Often, we would rather have a trusted friend tell us what the important things of the day, in their special area, are. It’s the trusted part that makes this relevant.

So–I invite your thoughts on this. Please add your comment below: What kinds of technologies, cultural traditions, or methodologies do you think we need to adopt, in order to adapt our systems for the unusual experience of too much information?

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Not. Can’t do that, right now. The desire to do all those things stops me from writing.

The irony is that the very essence of Web 2.0 is sharing information, and not, necessarily, worrying all that much about who is listening. And then, getting into conversations that interest you. Now, if you are smart (and want to), you can expand that into making more and more connections, and all of that. But if you forget the inspiration to just write, then you lose it.

This is an interesting thought about the success of blogging, and why a lot of my clients seem trepidatious about starting–Along with blogging making it technically easy to post new content to a website, it also set up a system of casual writing, where people could relax and just express themselves!

Cool.

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