The New York Times posted this hilarious picture of the Nokia Microsoft announcement. Not so funny for the possible thousands of employees who will be RIF-ed. Apparently there is an acronym going around Helsinki: GOOF: Get Out Of Finland

 2/12/2011; 12:57:25 PM.   .

As an information manager I use a lot of tools. Every tool Has a specific function, requires my manual hands-on operation and has only two requirements: it has to save me time and interoperate with my other tools.

The information I manage is primarily news. Not the kind that the NY Times, Guardian or even WikiLeaks provides, rather news that is percolating behind the headlines of the mainstream. This can range from a blogpost written by a scientist hidden several layers deep on a university website, to an email sent 'anonymously' from inside a big corporation to a local news broadcast from New Zealand. Once I think I'm 'on to something', the research starts. I collect links, quotes and other media assets (audio and video clips) that I then aggregate into a 'story' that I will discuss on my bi-weekly No Agenda podcast with John C. Dvorak. This discussion in turn spurs the audience to send me more information on the topic which often leads to a follow-up on the next episode of the show. Sometimes a story like High Speed Rail in the United States, or H1N1 Vaccine will become a 'topic' and will even get it's own jingle if it is revisted often enough.

The information flow for this comes from a couple of primary sources: twitter and (unfortunately) email.

I do not like my news information flowing through email. Messages are free form by nature, links need to be found in the body of the text, it's difficult to identify duplicates (I receive a LOT of duplicate stories) and since email is unstructured, I wind up doing a lot of copy/pasting from this river of sludge into my primary management tool, the OPML Outline editor.

Twitter is more enjoyable, since it's information flows like a pristine river all day in the corner of my eye. I have the TTYtter commandline client (screenshot) installed running in a terminal window. As it scrolls by it highlights tweets to me in red, search terms I've entered in green and everything else in white. I call it my serendipity window.

Serendipity is defined by Merriam-Webster as "the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for".

My 20 year old daughter and her friends mistakenly call this 'random'. Random pulls from a defined dataset. I'm pretty sure they mean serendipity. Despite the misnomer, this is what spawns viral content with the kids.

Even though we may not be able to define it for ourselves, we all love that one song on the radio you didn't expect, an article you never expected to read about a topic that never ocurred to you, or even an email from someone you haven't heard from in 20 years (this may be part of facebook's secret to success). I believe we all love to experience the unexpected.

I have been dilligently following Dave's reboot with his river of news project, as I desperately want to swim, fish and live from the purest river of news I can create and nurture. His piece this morning about a news river that send things downstream that I want and am interested in hit home. I do not however think this can come from a computer analyzing what I follow and like alone, it needs to deliver serendipty.

The killer serendipity app to me is people. People who toss stuff into my river that catch my eye when it floats by. Sometimes this is an email, other times it's a tweet @adamcurry that scrolls by with a link. Rarely is it from someone I already follow or subscribe to. It almost never comes through my current river of news. Until yesterday when I subscribed to Dave's linkblog and this gem caught my eye. I don't subscribe to the imdb rss feed (do they have one?) it would pollute my river, but this led me to the Atlas Shrugged movie which, judging by the trailer, not only looks atrocious, it appears to be blatent promotion for High Speed Rail. Serendipity.

Now for the hard part. I completely buy into a decentralized rss world to construct my own personal river, which allows for a single tool to manage the information I need effectively. What is missing is the @adamcurry of rss. How does someone toss a gem into my river without me ever following them or subscribing to their feed? Is this some kind of reverse rss? How do we allow for serendipity to be injected into the stream?

 2/12/2011; 10:48:56 AM.   .