“has found that as more journals become available online, fewer articles are being cited in the reference lists of the research papers published within them. Moreover, those articles that do get a mention tend to have been recently published themselves. Far from growing longer, the long tail is being docked.”

My reaction is that this is somewhat analogous to the average user not looking past the first page (first ten results) in Google. The other day, I watched a friend of mine try to search for some basic instructional information on the internet. If within the first few results, she didn’t see what she was looking for, she’d immediately change her search terms. I made some suggestions for different terms and what order to put them in, and she had a bit more luck, but we still had to look at more than a couple hits to find what she was looking for. (It’s pretty satisfying when you can put your madd library skillz to use outside of work!)

On the whole, we are growing more and more impatient and unwilling to spend any time to find high-quality information. This isn’t news, obviously, but it’s something I need to remind myself of, too – because I know I do it even though I know better. I loved the quote that ends the article:

“As a wag once put it, an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until, eventually, he knows everything about nothing. It would be ironic if that is the sort of expertise that the world wide web is creating.”

In the digital realm where, in theory, it should be easy to find highly specialised information about almost anything, we need to remind ourselves that good info doesn’t always float to the top. We still have to go digging for it, be critical of it, and not assume we are experts about any of it.

5. Trust your real-life colleagues. They know you: what you’re interested in, what makes you laugh, and what gets you riled up. And they’re already sending you things they know you’ll want to read. So go ahead, trust them. Give their suggestions priority, especially if they work in environments similar to yours. Don’t forget to return the favour. (I’m working on giving people a little more to go on than just “thought you might be interested” and adding something concrete and specific about why they should read it.)

4. Don’t over- or underestimate the heavyweights. The blogosphere is so ridiculously self-referential that anything really good (news, commentary, or otherwise) is going to get picked up by lots of bloggers, especially the really prominent ones. Find a few you consider to be “star” bloggers and get to know their posting styles. Reevaluate periodically…are they still living up to your expectations?

3. Be ruthless. For RSS, I try to review and weed my feeds every few months, to get rid of stuff that I subscribed to on a whim but haven’t looked at regularly since. As for paper, I usually have a pile of magazines and journals stacked up on my desk, both at home and at work, in which I will often find articles that are months old and pretty much out of date. It can be painful, but I try to remember Jack Handey’s advice: “If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let’em go, because, man, they’re gone”, and apply it to my accumulation of periodicals. Just let those articles go. They’re gone.

2. Think smaller and narrower. Until recently, I had the Wired RSS feed in my aggregator, but that baby spit up way too much content for me – sometimes a dozen or more new items in a day (which is obviously a fine volume of headlines or news, but not articles). I noticed that I was consistently keeping Lore Sjöberg’s AltText and Tony Long’s The Luddite columns new. So, I got rid of the “Everything from Wired” feed and subscribed only to those two. My IRL friend Laurel is a devout Wired reader, so I know she’ll pass along anything cool that she thinks I’ll enjoy.

(OR)

If you’re feeling extra ambitious, filter your feeds so that they capture only what you’re interested in. Steve Matthews has a good post on Feedrinse. I’m trying this out and so far it seems to work pretty well.

1. Do something with your newfound knowledge . That’s assuming you’ve found something that sounds useful or like fun to experiment with. Submit it to a newsletter, ask a colleague’s opinion of it, blog about it, etc. Whatever you do, do something with it! I find that the likelihood of me putting some new idea to use is much greater if I revisit it.

So there you have it. What works for you? Leave a comment if you’ve got any tips!

*Of course, I did a little research before writing this list. It seems they’ve already found the cure!