Kingsley 2.0

Before anyone, or particularly Scoble, gets offended, I mean that in the most flattering fashion possible. In a recent FriendFeed conversation, he very characteristically said:

interesting, but I want the noise, not the news.

And he’s right. If you’re reading the news, you get the same input about your field of interest that everybody else gets. Unless you process it in a radically different way, you will find it difficult to leap ahead.

Big-bang news puts everyone at the same level.Trickle-up news is the great differentiator. If you only get interested when it turns into news, you’re way behind the people who started following it when it was small. This is what motivates the early adopter - the possible shame of having to catch up. That’s why early adopters have to be bottom feeders, in the fish-that-live-at-the-bottom sense.

In many bottom feeders, a mechanism to deal with substrate is often necessary. In the case of some organisms such as sea cucumbers, the sand is usually passed through the body. In fish, sand will be pumped out of the mouth through the gill slit. - Wikipedia

So, What Do I Want You To Do?

If you’re serious about it, you have to find ways to process the noise, not just filter it. In fact you have to find ways to seek out more noise than is already coming your way. Some examples & ideas:

• I built myself a Social Media Firehose with Yahoo! Pipes just so I would know, in real time, if something I should be paying attention to pops up. I’ve made it general purpose, so you can too.
• Another essential skill is to practice continuous partial attention. I have my desktop set up for deliberate chaos. I have semi transparent twhirl windows hanging around the edges that bring alerts to my peripheral vision without disrupting what I’m doing.
• Scoble reads a gazillion feeds a day by using keyboard shortcuts on Google Reader.
• I find that with problems that take up a lot of my time, it pays to automate, crowdsource or outsource the work. My friends’ shared items in Google Reader tell me about the coolest developments in Indian politics, Psychology, Genetics etc, without my ever having to sift through that noise.

What tools,techniques and tricks do you use to process noise?