This is not a link whoring exercise so don’t go there. It’s about how I get some of my stuff done through others, faster and more reliably than I could be other means.
I’m an enterprisey type of guy and I’m pretty sure Robert Scoble would acknowledge it’s not really his thing. At least he acknowledged that last time we spoke and I don’t see a lot of evidence to the countrary.
But, I assiduously follow Robert’s linkblog via Twitter and in Google Reader. Why? Because when he’s not driving me nuts linking to a ton of iP***e stuff 
, Robert’s grinding his way through 739 blogs, reading some 28,000 posts and selecting around 1,000 of those each month for popping into his linkblog. Today, I found out I’m on that list. Which struck me as bizarre but then in a sense it shouldn’t.
The reason I follow Robert’s linkblog is because he can assimilate and filter information far more quickly than I. This has limitations because he’s looking for specific trends on a range of topics, many of which are of no interest to me. Even so, there’s enough in what he finds for me to consider the linkblog as an aggregated source of value to me. That makes his efforts the equivalent of having my own meta data librarian. The difference is that as a librarian, Robert is showing me the whole series of things I might not otherwise find for myself rather than leaving me to guess from some arcane reference system. He also makes it ridiculously easy to find and follow new information.
To that extent, Robert is acting in similar fashion to Umberto Eco and as described by KnackeredHack (reference courtesy of Thomas Otter
…Umberto Eco’s library, and the two types of people who visit the professor and notice his thirty thousand volumes. The majority assume that all the books have been read, and are impressed by this knowledge status symbol. But they miss the point. A very small minority realise that the professor’s collection of books is, in fact, an “antilibraryâ€, a research tool to find things, with Eco as “antischolar†focusing on the unread books, and being humble about what he knows.
When you look at the list of Robert’s sources, even a cursory scroll through makes it immediately apparent that these are highly representative of the Long Tail. I’ve not done a physical count but I’m betting a signfiicant number of the blogs Robert lists are followed by less than 10 people. That pattern appears to be repeated for a guy simply called Geoff who apparently also follows this blog and is tracking a total of 682 blogs but whose interests are entirely different to Robert’s and mine. And guess what? My feed profile looks pretty much the same as well.
Note to Dave Winer who invented OPML: I want to be able to confirm my simple cursory view – how do I get OPML data into a spreadsheet where I can order and represent it? I’m not a geek so humour me – please.
This feeds back nicely to something that David Weinberger said in a fascinating debate with Andrew Keen which you can see on Kevin Warbach’s Conversation Hub. David has recently published a book with the provocative title Everything is Miscellaneous. It’s on my reading list but in short David makes several important observations which I reinterpret as follows:
- There is an abundance of information that is being chopped into smaller and smaller pieces
- The notion of the definitive expert is challenged as information is untethered from paper sources and thrown out onto the Internet
- The ability to discover nuances through the thoughts of others is enriching our understanding of information to the cost of more traditional forms of book based research
The days I spent trawling through Leeds University library, the photocopying, the costs, the reading, sifting and discarding live long in my memory.
David’s position presents challenges which Andrew Keen discusses in Cult of the Amateur but that’s a debate for another time. Nevertheless, it seems to me that at a useful if superficial level, I have meta data I can explore as a way of accessing new information that enriches my understanding of things I find important. It’s a good start.
As a final note, I used to share stuff in the same way as Robert but in recent weeks I’ve taken to using Facebook’s sharing facilities. Why? Because it allows me to add data by way of comments directly to blog post content that can in turn be directly shared in my Facebook profile. It’s a sort of del.icio.us way of doing things but more immediately accessible to others who are in my network of Facebook people. It seems to work but it could be tidier. Again, it’s a start and it has generated a few conversations.
Technorati Tags: facebook, information economy, meta data, scoble
