Beating Information Overload

Given the veritable tidal wave of information out there, I find it difficult to track the many discussions taking place online. Aggregators, such as Google Reader, help me manage numerous RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, yet I always feel terribly behind, compelled, as I am, to read every piece of information just as I do with email.

A friend of mine made a suggestion: treat RSS content like a newspaper, not email. After all, you can miss the newspaper for a few days and not feel that you need to go back and read everything you’ve missed. What a concept! So I set about creating a Web control panel or “dashboard” that I could view each day much in the way I would a newspaper. In so doing, I put three well-known Web content pages—iGoogle, Pageflakes, and Netvibes—through their paces.

iGoogle is my own home-page favorite, so I started there. Its RSS reader widgets seem a bit finicky about the feeds, though, displaying some, but not others. And while iGoogle allows you to share individual widgets, there was no easy way to clone the full layout of an iGoogle page—which it soon became evident was a primary need. That’s because, like a newspaper, my information portal needed to have more than one page based on topic categories. Better integration with Google Reader functionality, which is surprisingly lacking, would have been a plus, too.

Netvibes, with great graphics and colors, seemed an attractive option. But it, too, did not allow me to easily share full-page sets. Plus, there doesn’t appear to be any easy way to change your main or public page once it’s set up. I did love their default to an internal reader program when you click on a specific post link, which helps you keep track of what you’ve already read.

Pageflakes surprised me. Not only did it meet my needs for this project, the program offers functionality that I hadn’t even considered. Besides having the ability to create a separate tabbed page for different subject areas, Pageflakes let me easily copy a page to create another, identical one—like a template—so that quick adjustments to the underlying content feeds produces a formatted page on a different topic. Not only that, but I could share as many of my pages as I wanted with others, allowing them to copy from a variety of styles where I had already done the heavy lifting of setting the pages up—making it great for educational use. To see (and copy from!) some pages I created to track several Ning social networks, access www.pageflakes.com/NingDashboard/3363844.

There’s no question that all three programs offer worthwhile features, but Pageflakes turned out to be the hands-down winner for me in building my “dashboard.”