There’s tons of information out there nowadays and at times I’m overwhelmed on what to do with it all. Solutions for organizing information are becoming more and more popular as people are encountering similar problems. Here’s how I find high quality information and organize it.
Discovery
As I said before, there is ridiculous amounts of information out there, but fortunately there are some great tools that let you pick and choose which sources you want to engage with. My favorite is probably Google Reader, which allows you to pull RSS feeds for any website on the internet and also provides a great way to organize the feeds. I wrote a post about it ages ago that you can check out here.
After Google Reader, the newest service that I’ve started playing around with is Pulse, which takes the same idea from Google Reader, but makes it much more visually pleasing and easy to use for mobiles devices. The user interface is great and its optimized for tablets, android devices, and iPhones. Pulse serves up content in a range of categories, but you also can add custom feeds that can be hit or miss at times.
And if you’re fortunate enough to have an iPad then Flipboard is an awesome information discovery engine that integrates content from a range of top websites in a very usable, magazine style presentation.
All in all, Google Reader, Pulse, and Flipboard are great for information discovery, but where I have found less solutions is on the information organization front.
Organizing
I’ve found few tools that are tailor made to such a need, but there are some that you can certainly tweak to provide an adequate solution. I think one of the best suited for such adaptation is Tumblr, as it allows you to share defined types of content/media including text, quotes, videos, pictures, and links. This type of structure is great for keeping track of information that you value, while also sharing it with others. A simple workaround where you define tag pages as your navigation lets you further organize the information.
Another tool I’ve found useful, but more specifically for images has been Pinterest. Essentially Pinterest lets you pin any images across the web and tag them to your boards for future use, either to keep track of information, inspiration, ideas, and more. You can check out my Pinterest boards here.
Overall I think that there is still a need for better organizational tools around information. Right now I think Pinterest has done a fantastic job in the images space and I hope to see more tools that are focused around organizing articles and videos in the future. If you know of any tools that are ideal for these needs please share!