Current Awareness

Thing 4 of our 23 Things gets us to look at Current Awareness. Now for me, this is definitely one of those "do as I say, not as I do" things. I have spent a great deal of my working life showing people how to set up citation alerts, ToC's and RSS feeds to further their academic careers. However, my own chaotic world of information overload continues to spiral out of control.

I guess what I really need, is not another tool to keep me up to date (I already subscribe to Twitter, Summify, various Jisc-mail and other professional body mail lists, and have several ToC's and Blogs pushed to my iGoogle via my Google Reader), but rather something that aggregates EVERYTHING in the one place.

I currently use iGoogle's personal web-portal and have found that quite handy. I am able to separate out my personal and work life through iGoogle, so I have a tab for work, social life, news and one for common tools. The work tab aggregates most of my feeds, and I even have the option of having my RSS feeds sent to Google Reader or my iGoogle account. These appear as the top three stories from each feed in a neat, summary format, which is about as long as my span of concentration can bear.

However, I still have thousands of unread emails from my software vendor, various committees, user groups, help groups, groupie groups... I'm sure some of them are important, but, let's be honest, they are NEVER going to be read! I guess the challenge is to get them into my iGoogle page too.