Information overload

It's a week of learning new skills here. Yesterday, our nearly 4yr old son learned to ride his new bicycle (no training wheels). At PSBDC, we've been busy exploring different technology for networking, researching, and education. Although my son is still a bit wobbly on the bike and needs some help getting started, he's on the path of progress. Although I am in no means an expert in these technologies, I will share with you what I've started learning, and will keep you up-to-date on my 'progress'.

1) Twitter - at first I couldn't comprehend 'why' - it was merely a status update? Two articles from Sixty4media prompted me to give Twitter more attention. In the last week, I've had 5 people start following my Tweets. Although not significant, but without any marketing, at this point, I have no idea how they found me! I'm assuming they have key word searches setup, but this is still an area for my exploration. These people, for the most part, have supply chain backgrounds, so immediately in the first week, I've connected with others in the field.

As well, I have Twitter update my Facebook status automatically, as well as updating a 'widget' on my website (still waiting on the web designer to redesign by the way). So with one single update (on the Twitter site or via SMS from my cell phone), I update friends and family on Facebook, followers on Twitter, and the curious on my website. No multiple entries required. I'm using Twitter as a means to share what we spend our days doing - a day in the life of a procurement specialist if you will!

2) Digg - From their website

"Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web"

I used to notice the Digg This icon beside various news clippings, blogs, articles, and until now didn't investigate. I'm still playing with this tool, but have decided it is an easier way to manage articles for future reference. So right now, I'm using this as a clippings file. I'm watching the news feed on Digg based upon popular articles, but for my purposes, Digg still needs further study.

3) Google Reader - I've used igoogle as my browser home page for quite some time. I can easily see at a glance breaking news stories, blog updates, the weather, etc. As Twitter has now shown me, there is a bigger world out there for exploring, so using key words such as procurement and contract management - I receive articles in my google reader as they are published/googled. This morning alone, I had 24 articles pop up. Not all were relevant to my search, so, I will refine the key words as I get results. This alert feature has led me to e-zines and blogs I had never known existed. Adding those e-zines and blogs to the google reader will let me know when new items are available for my reading pleasure. Google has an overview to set one up here.

This may sound overwhelming, but as with learning to ride a bike, after falling a few times we'll very soon discover how to manage the balance.

Luckily, I can speedread :)