On Twitter now, God help me!

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When I was Reviews Editor of InfoWorld in the 80s, I would get a stack of (postal) mail literally three feet high, every morning. Obtaining an electric envelope-opener was a major convenience -- as was obtaining an assistant to actually do the work, since slicing open the envelopes was the half of it -- you had to remove the material from the envelope, unfold it (usually), and place it in the pile.

Then I'd go through the pile, throwing out the 60% irrelevant. Then go through the remainder again to sort into Useful/Interesting and Dunno Yet.

That took an hour each morning.

By mid-90s, I got almost no physical mail at all. I was editor-in-chief of SunWorld Online, so most relevant mail went to my editors; but communications were mostly through email. That meant about 100 relevant emails a day -- plus 200 or so spam messages. I had two dozen subfolders in my inbox to sort through it all and felt it was a great personal victory to sort my inbox down to under 100 active messages on any given day. (Of course, filed-away mail was often forgotten thereafter.)

I also subscribed to about two dozen magazines at work, mostly free trade and professional journals, which piled up in the corner with only an article or two read in each. At home I subscribed to another 18 or so computer magazines plus fun reading like Forbes and Wired. Never kept up on them either. By the year zero (2000), I had cancelled most pubs and was down to perhaps five.

I retired three years ago and the first thing I did was subscribe to The Wall Street Journal and The Economist, Now That I Finally Have Time to Read Them -- fatally innocent conceit!

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The WSJ, my favorite newspaper in the world, plus two local papers (the metro and the local), extended my breakfast to two hours each morning. I couldn't keep it up -- it was just too much. And The Economist--my god, what a labor that came to be! It covers all the topics you normally skip by or don't get much sense out of in the regular press -- especially what's going on in other countries -- and you *think * you can just skim through them and get a sense of what's going on in the rest of the world -- but you dip into *any* article and the high-quality writing and the depth of your ignorance combine to force you to read the whole article.

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Since the magazine is 100 pages with not more than 10 pages of ads, that's 90 dense pages of text every week on MEGO subjects (Mine Eyes Glaze Over -- a Washington term for Very Important but Very Boring subject matter, like the Fed or Kazakhstan). It takes *hours* to read the thing. And while you're in the middle of reading it -- here comes another issue!

Tip for magazine publishers: A magazine whose main virtue is that you can skim through it quickly and toss it should not be dismissed. When I subscribed to all those tech pubs, the lighter ones that I could skim-and-toss in ten minutes I read every week -- Wired, I still have back issues from the 90s here!

Then I installed Bloglines and joined to the great Blog revolution. Despite occasional severe pruning, I have 96 feeds, some with 200 unread blogs, others with two or three hundred Saved blog writings. I love it; I can't spend four hours a day on it. Of course, I started four blogs of my own, to add to the general noise level. Sigh.

I finally signed up for Twitter, which offered me the opportunity to Follow the tweets of the people in my Gmail contacts list -- it turns out 82 of my friends and colleagues are Twittering. Eighty-two.

I Followed them all, just to get my feet wet. I now spend 20 minutes twice a day scrolling through Tweets, almost all of which aren't especially of interest to me. I UnFollowed two friends today and it was like losing five pounds.

Ovewhelmed by info? Oh yeah. Yet I love the stream of info, some of which is amazing, fascinating, amusing, shocking. Bury me with my stacked-up magazines, and my laptop tuned to Twitter and Bloglines -- I'll smile all the way to damnation, and complain to St Peter about it.

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