Victus Spiritus

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You're not missing anything when you're offline

22 Feb 2011

I'd go as far as saying the peace of mind gained from disconnecting is far more valuable than momentary attunement to current news.

Unless you're a bleeding edge news pro, a manual real time trader, or responsible for public relations, your livelihood won't be damaged by going offline and shutting out sources of short valued buzz data indefinitely. I'm aware of a handful of amazing companies that are zeroing in on relevance signals in order to help minimize the flood of data that requires filtering*, but the ultimate filter is our own judgement.

Early this morning I came across a post on meditation by Phil Dhingra, and his recent discovery of mindful practice. It spoke directly to the cost of short valued news.

I keep reminding myself of this quote from David Foster Wallace, "There are four trillion bits coming at you, 99% of them are shit, and it's too much work to do triage to decide. So it's very clear, very soon there's gonna be an economic niche opening up for gatekeepers... Because otherwise we're gonna spend 95% of our time body-surfing through shit." Why can't that gatekeeper be you?

Case Study: Open Source Web Software

Let's glimpse at one of my favorite news topics, open source software. There are thousands of potentially useful new software utilities created per day. There's no way I can give each of them sufficient attention to learn about their design and purpose. Out those a few will gain momentum and a sufficient community to grow into reliable products. Those survivors will push out updates on current releases without hesitation, including forks, plugins, popular applications that rely on them, and comments from devoted fans. I can't afford the time to track even one of these technologies, let alone the dozen or so that I really care about developing with.

Notes:
*= knowabout.it, my6sense, twitter, Google, Facebook