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“Infor­ma­tion over­flow” is prob­a­bly the phrase that describes our cur­rent age best. But as some­one who earns his or her liv­ing with ‘all things inter­net’, you can’t afford to ignore what is going on. But how to stay on top things, not loose focus and get new infor­ma­tion on time? In the fol­low­ing arti­cle I take a look at Deli­cious, RSS and Twit­ter and share my sys­tem of man­ag­ing information.

Be curi­ous

My Daily (from stock.xchng)

First and fore­most, even if you are an estab­lished web designer or devel­oper, there is always some­thing that you can still learn or even share with oth­ers. If you are just get­ting into this field of work, it will be even more impor­tant that you lis­ten to what oth­ers do and how oth­ers work. Go out into the depths of the inter­net and search for sites that pub­lish con­tent rel­e­vant to your work or inter­ests. There is always some­thing new com­ing up, there are always those that share infor­ma­tion that seem triv­ial at first, but can help you become a bet­ter designer or devel­oper down the road. And most of all, you will see how the infor­ma­tion is shared. Look at the styling of the arti­cles, notice the word­ing, ana­lyze the struc­ture. Don’t copy what oth­ers do, but be inspired to find your own style.

Most sites link to oth­ers with sim­i­lar con­tent, which makes it eas­ier to rather quickly find inter­est­ing stuff (and makes every­one very thank­ful for tabbed brows­ing). But as quickly as you dis­cover infor­ma­tion you can also become lost in the vast quan­tity provided.

Be selec­tive

Block Shop­ping L (from stock.xchng)

Before you start book­mark­ing hun­dreds of sites, take a closer look at them. Do they gen­er­ally pub­lish con­tent that is of inter­est to you? Or are there just two or three arti­cles in the entire archive that are rel­e­vant to what­ever you need? Cat­e­go­riz­ing web­sites into those that are full of inter­est­ing arti­cles and those that have only a few will help you decide on how to save the con­tent and keep your­self from being buried by bits and bytes.

Deli­cious — Your online memory

If I find an arti­cle use­ful, but the gen­eral con­tent of the pub­lish­ing site is not rel­e­vant for me, I book­mark it on Deli­cious. I can tag it and sort it and quickly find it again online when I need it, no mat­ter if I work in Ger­many or Swe­den. That is one of the key advan­tages over book­mark­ing pages locally in your browser. I am not say­ing it is a bad thing, but if you have mul­ti­ple com­put­ers — for exam­ple a desk­top for office use and a note­book for travel — it will become dif­fi­cult to keep your book­marks in sync. There are tools that do that and for Mac users with a MobileMe account it’s even eas­ier, but hav­ing it stored online frees you from even hav­ing to think about keep­ing track of your bookmarks. And if you put just some thought into tag­ging, you will always be able to look them up, even if you have hun­dreds of book­marks on Deli­cious. Best of all, it’s free.

There are also a num­ber of tools avail­able to man­age your book­marks from your com­puter or iPhone, with­out hav­ing to resort to your browser.

Sim­ply for the eye candy, my favorite of those two is DeliBar. In addi­tion, the free ver­sion lets you man­age your books­marks eas­ily. If you look for addi­tional func­tions like shar­ing or dis­cov­er­ing, the paid ver­sion is right for you.

For the iPhone, I use Book­marks so that I can com­fort­ably access my book­marks wher­ever I am.

RSS — The con­stant infor­ma­tion stream

If you stum­ble across sites that con­stantly pro­duce con­tent you find inter­est­ing, sub­scribe to their RSS feed. This way, you won’t have to check the site per sè every day or two, but the news gets deliv­ered right into your favorite RSS reader. That might not seem impor­tant to you if you have three or four sites of inter­est, but try it with more than 50. Skim­ming through the arti­cle pre­view tells you whether or not you want to read it or maybe even keep it. Many RSS read­ers allow you to favor an item so you can always go back to it, even weeks after it has been published.

I also have to admit that it has become part of my morn­ing rout­ing to read through my RSS feeds. Cur­rently, I am sub­scribed to 64 feeds of which 5 or 6 are plain news feeds like the New York Times or Ger­man news­pa­pers. The rest are all ‘web’ related. Sit­ting down in front of the com­puter each morn­ing with my Latte Mac­chi­ato and going through the news is a great way to start the day and get the cre­ative side of the brain to wake up.

The fol­low­ing apps can help you to man­age your RSS feeds:

I was actu­ally a long time Net­NewsWire user, but I found that for me per­son­ally the app behaved too unre­li­ably after the last upgrade, which got rid of the old sync method and insti­tuted Google reader.

I switched to Gruml after a long research and I am very happy with it. Ok, so it is still beta, but it syncs starred items with­out any has­sle, it is fast, and it works flaw­lessly with Google Reader and the iPhone app Byline, which is my favorite RSS client for the iPhone. Well orga­nized, pretty GUI, fast, and works — like men­tioned above — with­out any prob­lems with Gruml and Google Reader.

Twit­ter — Make your com­puter chirp

You might ask: if you are using Deli­cious and RSS, why in the world would you need to fol­low some­one on Twit­ter too? Doesn’t that mean dupli­cate content?

In some regards: yes. If you sub­scribe to a RSS feed and the Twit­ter account of the same page, chances are you will get infor­ma­tion again that you have already read through the other chan­nel. But good Tweet­ers also re-tweet con­tent that has not been pub­lished on their site, thereby enabling you to dis­cover other news sources you hadn’t con­sid­ered or found yet. I found that Tweets are extremely help­ful when it comes to find free stuff like tem­plates or icon sets, because many users re-tweet an orig­i­nal mes­sage and chances are, you will fol­low one of those re-tweeters. In addi­tion, some­times there are time restricted free­bies. Twit­ter spreads the chirp — excuse me: word — very quickly, giv­ing you bet­ter chances of par­tic­i­pat­ing in an event.

These are the apps I can recommend:

After try­ing out dif­fer­ent Twit­ter clients like Tweetie or Twit­terific, I got stuck with Tweet­deck — for the sim­ple rea­son that is can eas­ily han­dle mul­ti­ple Twit­ter accounts AND Face­book accounts. If you are present on mul­ti­ple social net­works, you will cer­tainly appre­ci­ate the abil­ity to man­age as many as pos­si­ble from just one client.

For that very rea­son I decided to go with IM+ on the iPhone. The paid ver­sion has push noti­fi­ca­tions for tweets, Skype, Face­book and a mul­ti­tude of other ser­vices. When you are on the road and need to stay cur­rent, it’s extremely helpful.

Wrap­ping Up

In order to keep up with all the great infor­ma­tion that is ‘out there’, ser­vices like online book­mark­ing, news feeds and social media can help you not to over­look things and stay cur­rent. They take away the worry of ‘miss­ing out on some­thing’ and greatly reduce time to check for news — no man­ual call­ing up of sites, but con­ve­nient desk­top or mobile appli­ca­tions that do all the work for you  - except the read­ing, of course. It is up to you decide how much infor­ma­tion you want or can take on. But with a good sys­tem and some patience you will be able to dis­cover new sources of infor­ma­tion and stay in touch with the newest trends in the design and devel­op­ment community.