… in ignorance. In his “not a better aggregator” series (1, 2, 3) Pito raises an important point. It’s not the aggregator that makes your reading better; it’s something that helps you discover the relevant quality material in first place. He knows what he says. We are working on the BlogBridge project together and face the unprecedented information overload. You wouldn’t believe what number of new sites, blogs and e-mail users emerge each day. It’s horrifying.

For a person, who wishes to follow what’s going on in the world, discover new places, do everything consciously, it becomes increasingly hard these days. I remember when I knew that the Linux documentation is here and the anecdotes are there; everything was so simple. Now we have 10 millions of Linux documentation sites, 50 millions of fun stories sites, and hardly ever will you be able to scan through all of them. This is perfectly applicable to the young blogosphere growing enormously.

If I like gadgets, most of you would recommend Engadget. But imagine unimaginable, I don’t like iPods and hate reading about them as all the news look alike written by an overindulged 5 year old (and there’s a grain of truth there, am I right? ;) ). Who will be filtering that out for me? I like cars and someone showed me a nice site about cars. I stopped looking for options and don’t think now that there are a million and a half of other. Now what if I do? How can I make a judicious decision on where to go first? If I were to visit all of them, the life would end far before I reached even a half of them. The information availability quickly becomes a curse these days and it’s unavoidable.

The oracles of the past foresaw this and started building directories, search engines with rating features, tagging systems of all shapes and sizes – all to aid people to help others find what they need. I just realized that we are trying to jump on a runaway train with this. The information grows, it multiplies and we aren’t likely to catch up with the blistering pace of the process. It’s not possible to organize it all whatever you do, sorry.

Here we approach the subject. To be continued …