The Internet is big and increases exponentially every day. The amount of information that is potentially (very) interesting to you does so as well. How do you keep up? This article gives you the five basic laws of survival in the modern day information age.

In our social media training sessions we often ask participants whether they are subscribed to a daily newspaper and if so, whether they read it from front to back. Many people still do this offline, but on the Internet, this is no longer possible. You have probably seen those YouTube videos citing enormous figures of the daily information produced by the Internet population. It vastly exceeds what any person can process.

One of the things we do at weknowmore.org is to train people how to deal with that waterfall of information. As the web became more social, people all over the world were empowered to create and curate content and also reach an extensive audience. As an information consumer there’s just so much more to choose from nowadays!

So how do you surf these waves? How do you find the stuff that interests you? How do you sift through all that is not? The answer is actually rather simple: continue doing what you’ve always done but do it harder, better, faster, stronger.

1. Accept big numbers

The Internet is so big and the content produced on it so numerous that you never will read it all. The only way to live peacefully online is to accept that you miss out on 99% of it.

2. Learn to skim

Now that you have accepted that there is too much interesting stuff to handle, skip most of it. There is no point in wasting your precious time. Keep skimming and skipping until you find something that’s really worth it.

3. Manage your time

Because of the sheer vastness of the web it can be quite overwhelming. Especially, once you get better at finding new sources of interesting information, you will notice that there is really, really, really-really a lot of stuff you like. It is important not to get (completely) lost in it. Reserve a specific amount of time a day to get updated and stick to that time frame. You still want to get other stuff done, right?

4. Use tools

How hard would my life be without the Golden Triangle: Google Reader, Hootsuite and Evernote. Tools can help you combine sources of information, save and store the highlights and communicate and collaborate much easier. To stay up to date with interesting websites we use Google Reader. We manage our Twitter accounts with Hootsuite but Seesmic, Brizzly and Whoopaa are also good alternatives. To save and categorize everything we find online, we use Evernote and have a Delicious account where we save and tag links that we shared through our weknowmore Twitter feed. There’s also a wide variety of browser plug-ins that make your life a lot easier.

5. Find good curators

Who knows better what you like than your friends? One of the powers of the social web is that it allows people to curate content within their social environment. If a friend recommends something to you, chances are that you will like it much more than if it were an anonymous recommendation. Sometimes however, strangers have interesting views too and strangers become friends. Interested in knitting? Make knitting friends, follow knitting gurus on Twitter and you will find the hottest knitting news, without ever googling.

There are also many people and organizations that not only produce but also curate content. In order to do our jobs, we at weknowmore.org have to sift through the web on a daily basis. The stuff we find interesting, we share with our followers through Twitter. And while we are at it, why not share the best content with you too? If you want to know what we curate, check out our Twitter feed and the delicious tag cloud below that demonstrates the scope of topics we curate at weknowmore.org.
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