Since my father introduced me to the internet sometime in 1993 I’ve been spending an accelerating proportion of my time on this earth chasing hyperlinks. Its the most wonderful crazy pastime and I’m so glad I’m alive to experience this staggering outpouring and accretion of thought, creativity & documentation from all of networked humanity.

For the first 10 years or so it was a fairly manageable habit, I’d visit a few favourite sites regularly and follow the links where they might wander and usually the trails would grow cold after a few hours or so. But with the advent of RSS things have changed, now the web pours in through my reader. and each day brings 100′s of new ‘items’ of human output in BOLD and i feel compelled to identify and offer some precious attention to those of interest, collecting and storing in Del.icio.us any of potential value.

Looking to reduce the time spent consuming and curating so I can instead add some of my own data to the flow I’ve tried various strategies. The latest realisation is that i must reduce my exposure to new items while at the same time trying to ensure that the items i receive to are of the highest quality. So today I’ve removed many feeds. leaving 334 subscriptions which I estimate will bring in around 300 items a day of which maybe a 100 or so will be worth investigating & perhaps the majority of those worth collecting & spending some time reading. I’m hoping this process can be reduced to less than 1 hour a day.

The feeds i removed had one or more of the following attributes:

• Too many new items per day with too many days where none/v.few are of interest
• Poorly formed feeds, cryptic/absent titles or excerpts rather than full text
• Too many promotional or opinion posts with less linking or original coverage/ideas
  Feeds with a consistent post format e.g. “Friday puzzle” that has become forced & patchy
• Too many “list of..” posts that take along time
  feeds that just collate links to stuff that is coming up in other feeds (no original contributions)
• Posts that are hard to read the contents of e.g. delicious’s daily automatic post to blog posts
• Photo blogs
• Group/Company blogs with many posts but no strong personal voice
• Own self monitoring feeds (my flickr updates/last.fm recently played) no longer fun to watch myself

The ones i kept have the following attributes:

• A few with very many items, but large percentage worth investigating (e.g. delicious popular) only handle 2 or three of these feeds though.
• Items added very occasionally (they go under the radar escaping deletion because a new item might appear only once every few weeks)
• Really well researched and written long form articles
• Anything covering design or user experience with original ideas and writing with 0-2 items per day,as these accumulate I will need to cull based on quality.
• Similar to UX but less important and more likely to be deleted feeds covering trends on the internet & in media
• A smattering of with 0 to 2 items per day covering other areas of interest: economics, psychiatry, game design, mobile, coding, art, SEO, marketing etc.

“The plan is to have all sorts of speakers speak about all sorts of stuff. Not brands, advertising, blogging and twitter but interesting, unexpected, original things. I’m hoping to find fascinating people and to just ask them to speak about something they care about. I want to replicate the experience of clicking from one really good blog to another, ranging across sciences, arts, musics, jokes and whatever.”

You can get an idea of the result here on Russel’sBlog and at the Interesting 2007 Wiki

Anyway, At the local version, Interesting South, they handed out an orange feedback form which i filled in but forgot to hand back. You can go to the official site now and watch videos of all the speakers. But I thought it might be interesting to test just how interesting it was by reading my feedback and then record any triggered memories to the echo chamber, here on this site.

So, some memories:

• Cheese tasting: Claudia of McIntosh and Bowman Cheese Mongers (I kept her card) was there offering free samples of 10 or so different cheeses. She was extremely popular as it was around dinner time and there was no other food to be had around there. Also the cheese was excellent – I can even remember likeing a goats cheddar but not what it was called.
• Nudie Juice or Smirnoff Ice: Inclusive of the ticket price, courtesy of the sponsors I guess. I liked the Nudie but couldn’t drink the vodka, blurghhh.
• Random book on arrival: Everyone was given a book from a pile under the welcome table, I’m happy with mine, A Princess of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs – written in 1912 but with a beautiful 1979 cover by Michael Whelan. I’m enjoying it but not sure I’ll read the other 10 books in the series.
• Lots of attendees seemed to know each other, I didn’t run into anyone I know (I often do at tech/UX related events. The MC Katie Chatfield introduced it as a marketing conference which surprised me, but perhaps that suggests I don’t know many marketers?
• Subliminals in Lauren Brown’s presentation, gorey art photographs.
• Dan Hill’s drawings in his slides. He said they were rough but they looks like ideal interfaces to me hand drawn floating in space where they’re needed.
• Mat Moore, possibly my favourite, a epic poem about bad love and ethnobotany? set to power point.
• Small Town Australia, photos from Martin Mischkulnig’s future book. I think he said we’re lied to about small town’s aesthetics, i’m not so sure.
• Hug Man: He’s being evicted for opening up his home, I wonder what happened. Is it OK to depend on others so completely by choice?
• Dr Adrienne Withall: Happiness: “Not depressed does not equal happy”
• Pia Von Gelder: Dorkbot. I like how Pia read out her prez, like a long essay in monotone, it worked well with the hundreds of images of dorks and their toys – I’ll have to go one day soon.
• Can’t remember what Errol Flanagan said. In some ways I wish he’d just made us all hum with our eyes closed for the whole 3 minutes rather than a few seconds – I was really starting to enjoy it. Also like his gestures, he moved around the stage a lot i think.
• Natasha Lewis was promoting her coffee and managed a to explain half of what Fair Trade is. Was it collectivisation to achieve economy of scale and guaranteed prices?
• John McWhorter described fleeing a charging moose on a dog slead – I can’t remember how he escaped
• Samantha Graham spoke about language, sexism inherent in English
• Tim Baynes talked about conservation, had nice animated sheep in his slides. He illustrated the tragedy of the commons. He had a great chart showing how energy consumption has been tightly following the rise in GDP, reconfirmed for me that it will be hard to save the world and maintain growth.
• Tiffany Kenyan: Tango is about control
• Gavin Heaton, not to my taste, the Clue Train Manifesto through the eyes of his own children, reminded me of dressing up pets in dinner suits. I thought their dolls house was impressive though.
• Tim Noonan was blind and scared us all buy walking too close to the edge of the stage. He says he can tell a lot about people by the sound of their voices, calling it vocology. My favourite thing he said was “In my minds eye your all beautiful sexy people” which struck me as an incredible concept. I cannot really grasp what my minds eye would see If i’d always been blind.
• Rachel Wotton. She said something like “imagine never being touched by another human being except to be washed”, I agree only being touched in non sexual ways would be painful if you retained sexual feeling. I admire and see the value in her work.
• Tim Longhurst spoke about his grass roots campaign to attack Coca Cola’s fake grass roots campaign. I see one of their billboards every morning at Kings Cross St and was tricked into following up the web address. Zero Coke Movement is a great slogan – I liked his point about the canned soft drink business being an environmental disaster

Those are my memories jogged by reading my feedback form. You can go watch the videos to see whether they bear any resemblance to what actually occurred.

I went to the Sydney Festival opening day events yesterday and felt like a stranger in my own town. Which is my own fault because I left some friends in Martin Place when the waiting around, crowds and distorted music got to me and on the way home decided to look around on my own.

Saw weddings on Macquarie St, didn’t watch for long but hearing the celebrants solemn words booming out over the wandering gawking crowds was odd.

Then went to the domain where I caught the last few songs by Paul Kelly. I like his songs but don’t count myself as a fan, still when he and Kev Carmody sang From little things big things grow I got goose bumps hearing the melody and watching the crowd against the Sydney skyline.

The blue fibre optic things everyone was waving were handed out by a bank (one with a blue logo as seen on the stage tent). At one point the MC asked everyone to wave their sticks on behalf of the bank, the concert wasn’t free they expected payment – we were to wave for the camera, everyone obliged. I like that they waved harder though when the MC said “wave if your scared shitless of interest rates”.

I stayed for the first few Brian Wilson songs then walked home. The sound carried a long way and I could still hear him singing from my loungeroom – Good Vibrations sounded good.