This is an interesting question - and I speak as one who shares both info and the trivial. I doubt whether filters would ever be able to filter one person's feed into what you as Roy Tennant want to see and what you do not want to see, since that in itself could shift from time to time. Twitter clients like Tweetdeck already let you see the people you want not to have missed - since you can make them into a group. That's also very easy to do with FriendFeed. It is not possible to drink the entire stream - if it's important it will come up again in some venue you are more able or willing to monitor. It's the same with research - 20 or 30 years (e.g., writing an ARIST chapter) ago one could admit that one would not be able to put eyes on every single piece of research published on a subject about which one was writing - now there is no excuse except overload, redundancy, and lack of personal time.

I figure the best of the ephemeral 'flow' will be filtered into the 'blogosphere', specifically planet Code4Lib which I do find time to at least skim most of.

If I didn't have time to even skim that... well, I suppose the best of THAT will (in theory) be filtered into our scholarly and professional journals. But if all I read was that, I'd definitely feel like I was missing something.

As it is, I actually hardly read professional/scholarly magazines at all -- and when I do, it's often because I was pointed to an article by the 'blogosphere'! I guess the editorial control of more 'formal' journals isn't as good at filtering what's of use to me as the 'blogosphere', hmm.

Candy: Are you implying that overload, redundancy, and lack of time are _bad_ excuses?

One human only has so many waking hours in the day. The amount of published 'literature' that one human can actually keep up with is becoming a smaller and smaller slice of the total literature, as that universe expands exponentially.

It's not entirely clear that the universe of the subset of quality, useful scholarly literature is expanding quite so fast, but it's surely expanding too.

Jonathan - no, I don't think they are bad excuses. Just facts. I don't think excuses are needed. I think I was saying the same thing you did - while the amount of stuff which is accessible is far greater, the amount one can keep up with has remained much the same (or perhaps is even less). We also agree that the stuff that's important will probably turn up in whatever branches of the stream we monitor. I have stopped feeling obliged to stay on top of everything. [And I also enjoy the occasional "here I am enjoying Zinfandel by my fireplace" tweet :-)]

Thanks Roy.

This post made me pull out Stewart Brand's 'The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT' to re-read his vision of 'Broadcatching', which describes an application) to assist content selection ('hunting') and viewing ('grazing' or 'browsing'). Fen Labalme is credited with coining the term 'broadcatch' back in 1983 referring to an automated agent that aggregates and filters content from multiple sources for presentation to an individual user.

An ideal 'broadcatch' agent would grab my RSS, Twitter, and Facebook flows and be smart enough to know which items are important to me right now based on my recent information seeking/gathering patterns. It would allow those items to flow through the dam while holding back the remaining until I manually open the gates.

"Broadcatch" -- I like it! It seems to describe exactly the kind of utility I'd like to see, although teaching it what is important is likely the hard part. Thanks for the citations!