Louis Gray approaches it from a marketing perspective and ReadWriteWeb from a more journalistic perspective, but I don’t think that makes much of difference.

Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe

The main pointers from Louis Gray were as taken from a therapy session (which worked on me), convincing us that we are in control and have the power to defeat the information overload monster. His main points were:

• Your are in control of what you subscribe to.
• Opt out of email lists.
• Use filters to ‘discover’ the important stuff.
• Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe.
• Skim like mad.
• Analyse your sources to determine follow worthiness.

What I like:

• Skim reading
• Quick source analysis

What I don’t like:

• Unsubscribing is not the solution.
• Overly complicated filters.
• No clear mention of grouping of sources.

Subscribe, Subscribe, Prioritize

ReadWriteWeb have their own take on how to control your information overload. According to RRW ‘groups’ are the holy grail of controlling the information of the social web. And in true social media style, they recommend you to subscribe to everyone who subscribe to you. Some pointers from the article:

• Group sources by topic.
• Prioritizing is your noise filter.
• Context brings meaning.
• Have your closest contacts handy.
• Value your weak connections.
• Follow everyone who follows you.
• Learn to appreciate the full stream.

What I like:

• Prioritize to filter noise.
• Using (broad) groups to create context.
• Selective follow-back.

What I don’t like:

• Following everyone who follows you.
• Too many specific groups.

Both are valid strategies or solutions if you like, to a common problem. I believe in a combination of the two. Unsubscribing is a tempting solution as it quickly decreases the noise, but it’s only a temporary solution as you will inevitable keep adding to your stream. Filters are good but can get complicated and hard to maintain. Filters are good for extremely targeted keywords, which makes them great as short term solutions for specific projects (or research for articles).

Time is a big decider as well. You don’t want to spend several minutes analysing every person who subscribe to you, or leave a comment on your site to determine whether you should follow back or not. You could either not subscribe at all, or simply subscribe to everything. I believe (not saying I do this) that everyone who follows you, are worthy of a follow back, IF; they are a ‘real’ person and don’t just spam their stream with links. It takes around five seconds to determine that.

Use groups, but don’t overuse them.

Don’t have too many groups, the more you have the more time it takes to determine where a source goes. Use a few broad topic groups, preferably no more than five.

Make sure you got a group with all your most important feeds/streams/followers. Most people could probably get away with just having one group where all the most important sources go. This is the best way to filter the noise, you know which sources are the most valuable, you should have quick access to all of them. Even if you follow 2500 people on twitter, you simply need 1 group with the 50 most important and you have cut noise significantly. You can pay attention to the important ones, and skim read the rest.

Don’t worry about missing stuff, if you are on twitter, friendfeed or facebbok, you can be sure that the community will let you know if you have missed anything. More importantly, focus on what your friends missed, that’s where the real value is.