I’m Back!

Going away for a few days has a number of benefits. You clear your head, you reconnect with friends, and you find out that sleep is NOT overrated! What’s different about going away now is that many of us are so caught up in our digital lives that we hardly ever take a step back and look at them since they move so fast.
I had that chance. the condo in which we were staying had no WiFi access so my communication was limited to email via Blackberry. Most web sites are not yet optimized for mobile access (get that on your “to-do” lists, folks) and the 3G network access was off and on. Using a dial-in connection just isn’t feasible since most sites routinely ignore their page weight – with so much broadband access out there, why not?
So I didn’t use my RSS reader and mostly stayed off Twitter and LinkedIn. Nope, I want to tune out a bit and here is what I think I figured out.
Much of what passes for content these days is vomit.   I mean that in the sense of it’s something that someone has regurgitated back, having eaten the original meal elsewhere.  I have literally thousands of items in my RSS reader from the last 5 days yet much of it is repetitive.  I probably net out at several hundred pieces of original content with news or new thinking.  Want a killer app business? Figure out how to make a newsreader that gets the gist of articles and eliminates the duplication or the ones that report on what another site/blogger said.  While there is a lot to be said to a brilliant aggregation site with respect to saving effort in staying current, it’s painfully obvious with several days’ content accumulated who is adding value and who is not.  I’m avoiding the latter from now on.

Twitter is becoming overrun with spammers.  I try to follow everyone that follows me but increasingly there are lots of folks that just tweet links to their latest and greatest thing for sale.  No thanks.  LinkedIn is heading down that road as well.  Groups have become places where you advertise, not engage in serious discussions.

I’ll have a few more thoughts on this later in the week but if we’re going to move the business of digital forward we’re going to have to examine the quality of the content upon which that business is built. Clutter doesn’t apply only to the number of ads on a page. Without adding value an entire site itself can fall into that category.
What do you think? Have you “tuned out” for any length of time?