How to capture an idea

From Joanne McNeil, this is one of my favorite blog posts in some time.  Excerpt:

I hadn’t realized my number of subscriptions (now 752) was at all unusual until the Bygone Bureau’s Best New Blogs post went up. And Nav at Scrawled in Wax responded with a post, How Many Feeds is Not Enough?

…Folders are key to keep from feeling overwhelmed. I have four must read folders “friends,” “daily,” “boston new&events,” and “ballardian” (pretty much every blog on Ballardian‘s list of links.) I have about a dozen other folders marked by subject, but everything else is subject to “Mark All Read” depending on the time I have to scan through it.

…The funny thing about this, is just a few weeks ago I dumped a couple hundred RSS feeds and stopped following a number of Twitter accounts to clean house. I feel like I could comfortably follow twice as many blogs without feeling fatigue as the number I follow has more to do with what I enjoy reading rather than a limit to what I can control.

It's best to read the whole thing and then save it to one of your folders.

By the way, Michael Nielsen has asked me how I assemble information.  I read about 10-15 blogs a day and two or three major news sources and three or four link-intensive sites, such as The Browser.  I receive a lot of emails from readers, which almost always I pursue.  I've optimized my Twitter feed to find interesting links, which includes following Michael.  Twitter has decreased the amount of time I spend browsing on the web.  Most of all, I read lots and lots of books and plenty of magazines, in numerous areas, plus journal articles in fields I work in.