The Three Online Wells of Knowledge

Wouldn’t it be interesting to live through history’s greatest inventions?

Gary Marshall of Tech Radar writes:

Since we came out of the caves, every new technology has been greeted with alarm and disdain.

When we invented fire, people moaned that we’d forget the art of making salads. When we invented the wheel, people moaned that we’d forget how to walk. And when we invented the internet, people moaned that we’d forget how to think.

The difference is, the internet moaners might be right.

After ground-breaking research in the realm of information and its effects on cognitive behavior, researchers found that the internet is, indeed, encumbering our intelligence as a whole.

The report finds that deep thought is replaced by fast-moving, dopamine driven clicking, flicking and shifting.

I argue that this stems from the fact that the majority use the internet without a focused, purposeful plan. We’re highly manipulable beings. Stimulation, flashes of action and fast-moving pixels quench our dopamine-seeking minds.

Yet, in the midst of this digital Wild West and this information revolution, sits a colossal amount of untapped value–even knowledge. The key centers on where to look for this value, and what strategy you wield to sift through the noise.

In order to gain wisdom from the crowds, a focused action plan is required.  Below we look at the three different wells of knowledge that you can draw insight from. The three wells are, (i) an RSS reader, (ii) a large industry user generated content site and, (iii) a niche user generated content site. After this, we explore the three-step strategy for sifting through the noise.

The Three Wells of Knowledge Online

Well 1: Focused Syndication

RSS is a severely underused and misunderstood concept in the online world. Those little orange buttons you see on websites–that’s an RSS icon.

Everyone tells you RSS is simple. “It stands for Really Simple Syndication!”

The irony is that even years after the birth of RSS, nobody knows how to use RSS. For this reason, I’ll refer to RSS as “Focused Syndication” from now on. The RSS term has so many confusing connotations with it, that the term should really just be dropped.

The Use Case Scenario

We’ve all had the basic email subscription experience. You find a great site, and you want to stay updated on their articles, so you fill in your email address. After about two weeks of receiving the posts via email, you’ve had enough. It adds way too much clutter to your inbox, and you just can’t keep up with the content.

That’s where Focused Syndication comes into play.

The principles of focused syndication centers on aggregating all of your posts, articles and content and housing them in a separate service than your email.

We will do this through a syndication reader. My syndication reader of choice is Google Reader.

Focused Syndication vs. Email:

• Email: Casual messages from people
• Focused Syndication System: Articles and posts from people

To set up your Focused Syndication System, follow these 5 steps:

1. Set up Google Reader

Visit http://www.google.com/reader and sign up

2. Change the view

Once you’re in, change the view to “List View”

3. Avoid almost everything

Google Reader is a very feature heavy service. Don’t pay attention to the home feeed, the suggestions, the stars, the shared items, etc. Those are all distractions.

The only elements you need to focus on are how to categorize and organize your folders in a manner that enables focus. If you’re having trouble ignoring all other unnecessary elements, you can install a minimalistic Google Reader script here.

4. Labeling for focus

For your Focus Syndication System, label folders based on their categories, and then a premium level.

For instance, break your stories into the following:

• Finance
• Career
• Technology
• Politics
• Business
• Health
• Sports
• Entertainment
• Comedy
• Premium Traffic Leaders (outlined below)
• Premium Thought Leaders (outlined below)

Then add a premium category, such as “Premium Traffic Leaders”–these are blogs or websites that are traffic-leaders in the space. They drive influence and are massive for the industry. They typically see unique visitors over 100k per month.

Then add a category for the up-and-comers; or otherwise referred to as the “Premium Thought Leaders.” These are blogs that aren’t necessarily the traffic leaders, but their influence spreads and is read by the traffic leaders. Such blogs in my case are Quick Sprout, Lukas Mathis and The 99%.

5. Checking the stories

Once you’ve set up your Focused Syndication System, its a matter of habitually scanning the headlines for the best, and most compelling stories.

In my case, I rarely read anything else but the Thought-Leaders; I scan the other ones from time-to-time, but the thought-leaders are where you’ll draw a lot of your insight.

Finding the Thought-Leaders

In a prior chapter on how reading effects the mind, we uncovered that what you read is just as important, if not more-so, than how much you read.

In the chapter, we identified how one should go about finding the thought-leader blogs. Here it is again, but expanded for creating a focused syndication system.

1. Visit AllTop, Technorati or search a term using Digg
2. Review the topics you’re interested in and select 10 blogs that look enticing
3. Read about five or so posts from each–also note their date (make sure the blog isn’t dead)
4. Cut your favorites from ten blogs down to three finalist blogs
5. Of the three finalist blogs, add them to their appropriate category within your syndication reader (Google Reader)
6. After a period of time, if the blog is still valuable, check their blogroll for additional blogs

Well 2: Leveraging Social News Communities

Defined, social news communities are websites in which users vote and determine how interesting stories are. For instance, Digg, is a social news site where users “digg” the top content on any blog, image, video or anything online that they find newsworthy. In turn, other users digg the story as well. If the story is dugg enough, it will appear on the front page of the social news site.

This typically results in blogs covering you, more exposure and more visitors to your site. The inbound links that you get from being on the front page of these sites will boost your ranking within the search engines.

Hours, upon hours, can be wasted within these sites. Many people preach that you should use social news sites for your business; yet, most wander into these sites without a focused strategy that engenders results.

Your goal with these sites is not to get on the front page.

Let me repeat that, your goal with these sites is not to get on the front page.

Why?

Because it’s likely not your core strength. You can have the best content in the world, but if you submit it to Digg without a power-user backing you up, you’ll rarely see it get picked up. You’ll end up wasting a wealth of time trying to get stories Dugg.

Instead, outsource this method to a power digger or PR team. Obviously, don’t try to game the system; Digg frowns upon this and may kick you out. Simply put, be smart. Don’t waste your time on Digg all day when you could be focusing on your core gifts–like creating good content.

Notice which stories make it to the first page. Understand the headlines and articles that make the front page. You’ll see headlines like, “The 47 Most Powerful Design Tips Ever.” Or stories like, “Man Catches Big Foot and Has The Caged Animal to Prove It.”

The stories that get on these sites contain very powerful headlines, or unbelievable ideas that make you stop and pause. If you’re a content creator, you want to adopt this style of thinking when creating web content.

However, for most of us, your focused strategy when using social sites centers on simply leveraging the social proof of others to source good stories, and stories worth reading.

We’ll soon outlined the three-step method for sourcing good stories. In the meantime, here’s an article that lists 50 social news sites.

Well 3: A Niche Story Machine

The previous wells for gathering knowledge (your syndication reader and the social news site) are great for gathering stories; however, you should also find an online community that relates to your industry in which you interact with personally.

There are many niche social news sites out there that are smaller in nature. They appeal to a specific user or industry.

With these sites, you’ll want to become very active and get to know the users outside of the social news site. In these niche sites you’ll find a lot of talent. You’ll find people, that like you, want to increase their skills or knowledge about a specific realm.

Examples of these sites include answer communities like Get Sponge, Pligg-built sites, vbulletin built sites or even blogs. They include communities found in many member’s only websites. They include communities found in message boards. Or book clubs. Or Meetup groups.

With these niche communities, your goal should center on giving back and interacting with members of the community on a daily basis. Make it your goal to answer everyone’s questions on the message board or answer forum. Obviously, don’t just answer questions for the sake of answering questions; provide valuable answers. If you can’t provide valuable answers, and you’re really interested in the niche, take a back-seat and don’t respond until you can actually help people.

Why invest time in this?

1. First off, make this a quick habit. Not something that you get carried away with. Log in, answer the questions, and get back to the day. Don’t spend more than 5-10 minutes during this process.
2. You’ll meet talented individuals
3. You’ll establish yourself as an expert among these individuals
4. You’ll get more traffic to your site because you’ve established social proof as an expert

The Three Step Method For Sourcing Knowledge:

Above, we outlined the three wells of knowledge; but how does one actually sift through the level of information? How do you source knowledge from the three wells outlined above?

We’ll now combine this strategy with a daily activity. Below is the three step method for sourcing knowledge:

1. Visit one of the wells outlined above and spot three valuable links and stories
2. Apply Readability which is a web application that allows you to format the page of any website into book format.
3. If you find the article noteworthy, share the article on Sharefeed, which is a tweet scheduling tool

Below is a video I made that shows exactly how to source knowledge using the three step method above.

In the video above I’m using QuickSilver, a Mac application that allows me to type which services I want to open. For instance, if I type in “Gmail” it will open up my Gmail. [Also, of note, QuickSilver's site looks odd. If you're a mac user, just download it].

Using Quicksilver, I open up my “well” of choice, which is a social tech news site called Hacker News (it’s the orange and tan colored site).

I then apply the Readability widget, and then share the story on Sharefeed. After which, you can visit Sharefeed’s website and actually schedule out when you would like the story to be Tweeted.

Repeating this focused process everyday will not only allow you to quickly sift through the noise-driven stories, it will allow you to gain a following for providing valuable stories. Best of all: it takes very, very little time.

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