Category: IO Tools

Since Google ditched Google Reader, RSS has receded from many people's awareness. Yet RSS and versatile RSS readers such as NetVibes continue to exist, and if you want to learn information skills to support attention skills, you can do no better than Dawn Foster, who can tell you simply and step-by-step how to arrange for the information you want to come to you, and to filter out the information you don't want.

How to Hack RSS to Reduce Information Overload

Dawn Foster

GIGAOM, 25 March 2011

Summary: The key to cutting information overload is to more efficiently find the data that you want among the data that you don’t care about. I wanted to share some of the techniques that I use to hack and filter my RSS feed to prioritize relevant information.

Last week, I held a session at SXSW Interactive titled Hacking RSS: Filtering & Processing Obscene Amounts of Information, where I talked about creative ways to use RSS to manage information overload without using any programming skills.

Continue reading “Howard Rheingold: Hacking RSS to Reduce Information Overload with Filtering Tools”

This could be a really useful tool for creating a back channel.

ROBERT STEELE: I have been re-kicking the tires on the obvious aspiring analytic software packages, and find all of them unworthy for multiple reasons ranging from an inability to ingest data to an obscene amount of training being required to extract data to a general uselessness at making intuitive leaps. I asked one of the absolute masters what they thought, and below is the answer they gave me. Following this deeply critical commentary from someone I look up to, I provide the short story on how I appear to have been the only person in the US system that understood the Bi-Lateral Agreement (BSA) with Afghanistan would not be signed. No software was involved in any way.

The question as I posed it: is there any analytic software out there that might be a candidate for a fresh start against the eighteen CATALYST functionalities? Is there any analytic software out there that is worth a damn, apart from sources, analysts, context, and smart commanders that will entertain doubts, anomalous thoughts, and best guesses?

ANONYMOUS: I wish I had a good unchallenged answer to your question. The fact is that all analysis software is basically useless unless the analyst has a good handle on what is actually going in (imported) and what is going out (exported). I worked with Analyst Notebook from the very beginning (infancy) to its maturity, with all the bells and whistles attached, but the ultimate analysis comes from the analyst and even then making predictions with the analysis is still shoddy. I have also used CrimeLink, which is almost a clone of Analyst Notebook, and the same goes for that piece of software: it will only provide information, not intelligence, in a nice to use format (same as Palintir) that the analyst still has to massage in order to create intelligence.

Continue reading “Robert Steele & Anonymous: Most Analysis Software Sucks — And Story of How Steele Correctly Called BSA Not Being Signed in Afghanistan”

This looks like an interesting attempt to develop tools for digital study skills

The fully automated bibliography, research, citation, and internet highlighting tool.

The Art of Discovering Pearls Inside the Sand: How, Tools and Skills Advice from Beth Kanter

A good introductory article to content curation for organizations and non-profits. It provides good description of the purpose of content curation and of tools and key skills required.

Beth Kanter, provides lots of good resources, tools and other articles which kindly highlight and link also some of my recent content curation work.

Resourceful, informative, to-the-point. 8/10

Full article: Content Curation and the Art of Spotting the Awesome

Reading time: 5′

See also from the same author:

• Content Curation Primer
• How Nonprofits Get Significant Value from Content Curation