On the one hand it’s frustrating having practically zero readership as one of my goals is to actually entertain people. On the other, writing out one’s thoughts and having an actual place for them to go that’s not a dusty old notebook hidden on a shelf is, at times, therapeutic.

As for comments, I also leave them at other sites. Though those sites are usually very very specific. The comments I leave that beg for discussion are usually at sites wherein that is the culture, such as The Joy of Tech. Otherwise, I expect nothing.

The information overload issue is not that there is so much information, the problem is that it is so easily accessible. It’s exceptionally easy to read an article at one site and spend hours link hopping.

On the other hand, as Keith Weintraub pointed out above, I too have researched many topics that I otherwise would not have without the Internet and http://WWW. I also utilize information available online for most, if not all, of my purchasing decisions.

The comment I wanted to make in reply to Ted’s post is that this is entirely similar to the Unboxing phenomenon, where Apple commentators are in such a rush to get the first review of the new product that they’ll take a photo of the thing while it’s still in the box. People want to make sure that their opinion is heard and is heard early, and the web allows that; research is a slow and tedious process which gets in the way of posting.

P.S. First!!!?!

- A lot of what is out there is duplicated. I get a few different tech and business RSS feeds and invariably many the articles cover the same exact ground.

- I think that for a given topic that I might be interested in I actually read a greater percentage of the “total knowledge available” on that topic than I would have otherwise. That’s because info on the internet is easier to retrieve than it would be in the Library of Congress for example.

Some topics that I probably never would have explored except for the internet: Scientology, Mormonism, The Norman Conquest, Tolkien, Chomsky, Genome.

All in the last 6 months or so.

All of these were looked at for a few hours each. Not as deep as reading a few texts but much deeper than I would have otherwise.

Speaking of how comforting to know that an article has been edited for style and accuracy, you wrote “One one side…” on that penultimate paragraph…:) {now fixed}