Connection

…in this hyperconnected world is more and more a feature we have to adjust ourselves to.

I can hardly remember when I started working in the field of Information Communication Technology. (Well, actually I remember it quite well, Aug. 24th 1995) And getting connected at that time meant you would have to set the switches on your modem correctly.

And that’s what I did when I first started working as a Phone Technician. Helping UK customers on the phone setting switches manually. I am trying hard now to remember the correct word for it… Maybe I’ll get to that later. Ooh and I am writing in English to connect to my friends in the US…

I am also writing this piece with another thought in the back of my mind about connection. I am connecting this post to appear on another website automatically. Therefor I had to write something and see if the connection works.

These last couple of days it struck me how my job revolves around processing of information. Various inboxes get cluttered with information that in some shape or form have to be relayed to yet another inbox of another person or delegated stakeholder of some sort. And as I was thinking about using various systems to connect these ‘inboxes’ I came to the realization that that must be really hard for a lot of people if you don’t have a system that will aid you in that effort of curbing the information flow.

So curbing information for me also means making sure that information appears on different platforms of my choice by adding rules to these posts. In that sense I can reach different groups of people with the information I want them to reach. Hopefully helping in curbing their information flow.

Let me try and give some advice on how you can curb your flow of information if you are on different platforms reaching different kind of audiences.

1. Use one channel to reach several others. For instance the WordPress blog can be connected to Twitter, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIN etc. If you are writing something businesswise you might just want to reach out to Linkedin and not Facebook. If you are writing something more personal, it probably is just the other way around. Use tags and categories to enable this using a service like IFTTT or a social media agregator like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck. The services are 1-to-N and N-to-1 so to speak. More on that maybe on a different post.
2. If you have a collection of favourite websites you like to follow up, you might want to consider using a RSS feed reader that combines all these websites in a magazine like platform such as Feedly.com or Pocket or paper.li All these paltforms are more or less making it easier for yourself to combine more channels of information into one collected space. For productivity reasons you read these feeds on a specific time during the day instead of having to visit these websites one by one, looking for the latest addition.

If you want some more background info feel free to drop me a line. We’ll have coffee, connect in the real world and exchange some thoughts / ideas while we are on the subject.

Good luck in placing this piece of information in your correct ‘inbox’…