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| From: Andy2Boyz |
I was working my way through a professional membership application
when the questions turned to demographics.
How big is your organization?
What is your budget? How many
people in your department? Then they
popped the question that I hadn’t been asked in ages: What Industry Related Publications Do You
Read?
I was taken aback and realized that the question was quite
normal in 1995, even in 2005 or maybe even 2010. But today, in 2013, with the vast increase in
social media, blogs, twitter feeds, podcasts, and professional online
communities, I must say that I don’t read any of them any more.
It was a good list, made up of the cream of the crop from
2003: Business 2.0, Business Week, CIO
Magazine, Computer World, Forbes Magazine, Info World, Information Week, Network
World, Red Herring, Wall Street Journal, just to name a few. But the reality is that it has been many
years since I received any physical magazine in my inbox. Come to think of it, for the last 18 months,
I received nothing physical at work, other than a few vendor gimmicks. All of my communications and my consumption
of content has become digital. The
switch finally happened and I didn’t even notice. Read on to see how this Social CIO keeps
current today.
It started about four years ago when I began following thought
leaders, analysts, and bloggers on twitter.
I found if I was selective with my “follow” population, I could get a
customized feed in my twitter stream every day, throughout the day to satisfy
my technical appetite. Once I started
following 400 or 500, I began to get overwhelmed, missing many tweets. As a result, I found myself getting very
selective about adding new tweeters to my stream. That’s when I discovered the power of twitter lists.
Twitter lists are an ingenious invention that allows you to
segment those you follow into logical lists grouped by topic, locality, or
anything you like. I pulled together
about 300 sources that I thought were most valuable based on my then-current
interests around Enterprise 2.0 and Mobile trends. That became “The Short List”. It wasn’t so short, at 300 sources, but provided a
very focused feed and allowed me to keep adding to my twitter “following”
number without worrying about getting overwhelmed in the feed.
Later I created an additional list, simply called “list”. I didn’t want to offend anyone on “the short list”, but this group was mostly professional acquaintances and a subset of my “short list” pared down to the 100 that I wanted to follow even closer. Since then, I’ve added other lists for various topics, and followed lists created by others who’s opinions I respect, but I keep coming back to my “Short List” as the key source for my daily information feed.
Later I created an additional list, simply called “list”. I didn’t want to offend anyone on “the short list”, but this group was mostly professional acquaintances and a subset of my “short list” pared down to the 100 that I wanted to follow even closer. Since then, I’ve added other lists for various topics, and followed lists created by others who’s opinions I respect, but I keep coming back to my “Short List” as the key source for my daily information feed.
Moving from Push to Pull
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| My personal daily paper |
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| Curated by the top influencers in Enterprise Mobility |
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| Future this! collects future oriented stories |
I have just mentioned two sources of expert lists and
content presentation platforms. I expect
there are and will continue to be other products continuing to evolve as they
tap into the collective editorial skills of the crowd and produce custom feeds
of news, trends, and developments in a handy easy-to-digest format.
So, getting back to that original question, What Industry
Related Publications Do You Read? For many today, it’s the wrong question all
together. The real question should be How do you stay current in today’s fast evolving technology world? My answer is a customer feed of
self-maintained and custom generated expert lists, combined with the publishing
platform of Paper.Li. I would love to
hear how you stay current in the comments below or through your return tweets.
Now, do you understand why the entire print news industry is
on “death watch”?
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| Sections of The Short List Daily |
