Allan Hoffman

At the Murderati blog, crime writer J.T. Ellison takes in the topic of information overload. The post includes some interesting thoughts/musings on the topic—in particular, how to control your info-consumption and also tackle creative projects:

Late last year I adopted a minimalist lifestyle, which included trying to have a more minimalist experience on the Internet. I just realized that in my quest to learn about minimalism, I ended up subscribed to 12 minimalism/productivity blogs, all of which basically repeat the same information over and over again. Not very minimalist. It was ridiculous, really. Anyone can talk the talk. It’s walking the walk that’s the hard part. There’s one blogger (who shall remain nameless) that I used to love. When I realized that he spent all his time talking about creativity, yet never creating, I deleted him from my feeds.

Steven Johnson has an excellent essay in Time about the iPad, its shortcomings, and what we might (or might not) see in future updates. As he says:

The iPad interface — like the iPhone’s — tries to do everything in its power to do away with documents and files. There is no Finder or root-level file navigation. It’s apps, apps, apps, as far as the eye can see.

Read more: Apple iPad Shortcomings Spark Questions about Updates.

I love this brief essay from The New Yorker’s George Packer about the “information hell” of Twitter. Yes, I use Twitter, but I’ve got serious reservations about it, and Packer captures this:

The truth is, I feel like yelling Stop quite a bit these days. Every time I hear about Twitter I want to yell Stop. The notion of sending and getting brief updates to and from dozens or thousands of people every few minutes is an image from information hell.