Hats Off to Google. (Part Two)

(Cont'd) Having access to that amount of information requires strategy. It means scrolling quickly through feeds that don’t produce a high volume of interesting or usable items and knowing when a feed needs to be cut off. When I don’t have time to read something in detail, I put it in my starred items, which is getting increasingly longer every week.

The search capability makes Google Reader essentially a massive Bookmarks program (although I also use Google Bookmarks for links I can't subscribe to). When I see an item that other people might find interesting, I put it in my shared items that other people can subscribe to. I don’t always agree with the author or subject and I don’t always endorse whatever I share, it’s shared only when I think it might be interesting to others who subscribe to my shared items. It also helps me when I want to email or send a link to an interesting story. If I want to revisit the story about the world-renown violinist Joshua Bell who played to strangers in a subway, I can find it in five seconds. Google Reader has reduced the time it takes to search for interesting things by about 95%. It’s amazing.

The biggest problem is information overload, but I’m sure everyone’s seen articles highlighting those pitfalls in titles that go something like, “Is the Web Killing Our Attention Span?” or “Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Information?” To answer the latter question, I don’t think there is, I think it just depends on how you handle it. Like any tool, I think Google Products can be used more productively and successively than almost anything out there in the Web world. They just added another feature in Google Labs called Google Pages that is a web page creator. I'll definitely be using that when I get some time.

For those who know how to use all the products, they can really keep you informed of important issues, funny articles and random-yet-interesting facts and events at lightning-fast speed. Or it can let you know what complete morons are doing these days. Either way.