Rivers, Lakes and Islands of Information

The good news is we live in an information age, the bad news is all of this information is overwhelming many of us. Mashable has a great article on how to deal with social networking overload and gives very good guidance on how to choose which networks to join and how to divide your social networking lives, but in today's world there is more to life then just social networks.

I look at information as streaming, flowing or relatively static or as:

- Rivers: Tweats, Facebook updates and emails
- Lakes: Blogs
- Islands: Websites

While most data is searchable, the reality is much of it flows past us so fast that if we don't see it when it first comes in, it flows downriver so fast it is gone forever (how many emails did you get today?).

We try and catch what we can and capture it via tags, bookmarks, email and other types of tools and sometimes even we even print them in a vain hope that we can manage the paper we are already drowning in.

Slower moving data like Blogs doesn't require our immediate attention, but blogs come and go and topics hit and miss, so finding the gems in all of this is sometimes like finding a pearl in an oyster ... unless you are reading this blog :)

This brings us to those islands of data, our websites. A company's website is where we need to keep the relatively static data (and e-commerce) that customers come to depend on (try to figure out a stores hours from its twitter feed).

So with all of the focus today on Facebook, Twitter and Blogs (#ftb), it is wise to remember to use these rivers and lakes of information to float people to our websites. In order for this to pay off make sure you keep your focus on building good websites that provide good information, strong content and a great user experience to actually generate revenue for your business.