Information Fragmentation

Some days, it's overwhelming.

On any given day, and several times each day, I scan the following for new or updated content:

• 1 LinkedIn account
• 1 Facebook account
• 3 news sites (NY Times, NPR, CNN)
• 5 social bookmarking sites (Digg, reddit, Mixx, StumbleUpon, and Sphinn)
• 7 tabs on my Google home page consisting of
• 32 Google widgets
• 10-20 Blogs for post comment threads I may be following or new posts I may have missed.

Within those, there's some overlap. For example, I have RSS feeds for the news sites on my Google home page, but there's always more to see and read on the site itself. So when I saw this post about TwitterFeed, I couldn't help but wonder if I, or anybody else, really need yet another place to have RSS style content delivered to me. I interpreted Jane Copland as touching lightly on this concept in a recent SEOMoz.com article. When talking about activating a Twitter account for herself, she wrote:

I didn't try to convince myself that I'd signed up in order to keep ahead of the world's breaking news, to connect with important people or follow the torrid happenings at SXSW. I did it to add yet another method by which I can communicate with my friends, because we're lacking those. What I noticed, however, was that there is interesting information to be found via news sites' accounts, but they blend in all too well with the idle chatter.

The intent for a product like TwitterFeed is obvious. Many people are passing much of their day on  Twitter and online marketers are keen to get in front of their audience as frequently as possible. The challenge, however, from a user perspective is that no one delivery vehicle is ever complete. As a content consumer, it's not clear to me why I would want to follow an RSS feed on Twitter when I already have too many content aggregation points. One might argue in favor of TwitterFeed, and in doing so  might say something like this:

"It's just another option for the user, and one of the great powers inherent in digital media is the latitude it provides the customer. No longer can content publishers dictate how content is consumed, but rather the consumer has become accustomed to the wherever/whenever paradigm of content consumption."

That's all well and good, but it creates the problem of information fragmentation for the user - not all information is available via all channels - which in turn exacerbates the problem of Audience Fragmentation. So while the user is spending more time bouncing from channel to channel, online marketers are spending more time trying to reach those consumers, and the content publishers are spending more time trying to find new avenues to deliver their content.

And so round and round it goes. Where so often technology is produced to make us more efficient, a content production-consumption cycle has been created that continually is taking up more time of everybody involved.

Comments

[Online pharmacy]

And so round and round it goes.