The Free View-- weblog of a presidential candidate

Information Overload Management

As much as it may seem like I am dangerously over-diversified in my committment to all the projects I started and maintain, behind the scenes things are looking pretty good, in terms of successfully managing it all. And much of that is thanks to blog software.

Which should provide some cushion to the blow when I say that I started another weblog. It's similar in spirit to E-Actions for Freedom, in that it's another way for me to spread the word about things I see, but the content and style are totally different.

Announcing The Little Brown Reader -- a rolling catalog of the articles and web sites of significance that I've been checking out. I don't know what's going to come of it, but I think it will ultimately make things easier for me, strangely enough. My desktop is often wildly overloaded with web pages, many sitting waiting for me to post something about them-- or more commonly, waiting for me to decide if, how, where and what I'm going to post about them.

So The Little Brown Reader will serve four main purposes: 1. To build a page/site/archive of interesting items about a variety of issues. 2. To let me "dispose" of worthwhile items without having to end up writing an essay about them. 3. To provide people a look at what all I'm consuming in terms of information. 4. To store items (for me), for possible later reference or commentary.

I don't think I'd be looking at things so rosily if I hadn't finally figured out how to make "Bookmarklets" work in my MovableType software. I just got them working last night, and now I have them set up for almost all my blogs. What it means is that if I want to post an entry about a web page, now I just right-click on the page, and select which blog I want to post to. Then a pop-up window comes up with a titled link to that page sitting ready in a mini new entry form. I post whatever I want to say, click save, and there it is. Then I close that window and move on. Prior to this, posting an entry has been a much more inconvenient task. It was still handy in the grand scheme of things, but I can't even begin to estimate how much faster and easier these Bookmarklets make it.

The other big hurdle for me has been in gathering collaborators, and like-minded folks, and having easy ways to involve them, and keep them updated, etc. Group blogs and the e-mail notification function provide the boost in those areas...PNAC.info is a testament to that, and it should work well for StopCarnivore.org, among others.

The third big hurdle has been information management problems. I multitask like there's no tomorrow -- it's just my workstyle, I think -- and it's easy, indeed common, for me to get lost and/or buried while doing so. MovableType allows me to post drafts for finishing later, and lets me set up release valves like E-Actions for Freedom and The Little Brown Reader.

Many of my sites involve (in part) disseminating news and opinions about a select group of issues. In the past, information overload and lack of these new innovations made it hard to keep things flowing on all the different sites. I just wasn't able to keep up with them all. Now, I feel like I'm just on the cusp of getting a handle on it all. There's a lot more I need to do to get all the way there, but things are most definitely looking up.

This is all just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the web presence I plan to build over time, but it's surely a threshold moment in the evolution of it all.

Yay! :-)

Oh, I almost forgot that some of my glee is because I discovered a plugin that creates an easy "E-mail this entry" form on individual entry pages. It should go without saying how sweet that is -- I wish I had it up months ago.