I’ve been neglecting my blog a bit due to lack of time. I’ve also given up reading other blogs as regularly on my RSS feed since I found that many people felt the need to blog regularly, even when they had nothing of value to say. Reading my RSS updates every morning was becoming just as time consuming as trying to clear my inbox of those nagios, cron and other messages I really should not be getting anyway.

Everyone seems to be at it.. Whether it’s a wordpress blog, a twitter feed or your facebook status–There is an expectation that you should be annotating your life online. Of course it is human nature to interact with others, and the Internet is now just making that easier.

So, what’s the problem? With more and more information being directed to us, we have to find better ways of processing that information in an efficient manner to be able to make any use of it. Even managing twitter effectively is difficult without some kind of app.

Presentations are another area where this phenomenon is quite clear. Over the last year, I have seen many presentations and most seem to have one trend in common: They could be condensed by 70% and still contain all the necessary information I needed out of them. Is this because I am already aware of the topics? Maybe in some cases, but generally presenters are not encouraged to keep to the point. (I am sure that as a presenter, I am no better than those I seek to criticise.)

I have been somewhat impressed by the quality of some of the presentations at the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference in London (2008) and Dublin (2009), although still I find that they could cover material more efficiently. Perhaps the best examples are in some of the TED talks which are often only a few minutes long.