There are way too many social networks, Web 2.0 sharing properties and the like for me (and most others) to have enough time to spend. There’s even a term that’s been coined – Attention economy. Many startups are being told ” where attention flows, money flows”.

There are 3 strategies I have adopted to avoid information overload. One of the is what Clay talked about last week at Web 2.0 apparently.

1. Decide what’s important vs. useful. Useful to me is immediately actionable within a week. I spend my time to do what’s important right now and Instapaper the useful stuff.

2. Build good filters. I have over 1800 friends on Facebook and have met at least 1500 of them in conferences, etc. Rest I have been either conversing on Twitter or been introduced by another friend. I get a ton of things on my Newsfeed. I love the new Facebook filters. Use them constantly and you get great results. They give you control on what appears on your feed and who appears.

3. Outsource some attention filtering. I used to subscribe, scan and track over 400 bloggers. Now I have outsourced my reading by only reading 5 of my friends shared items and HackerNews. They cull the best and give me the stuff that matters. Get good filter friends to share with you on Google Reader.

What’s your strategy? What techniques help you best filter the noise or the news – depending on what you want to filter?

Image credit: wolftrapopera.blogspot.comwolftrapopera.blogspot.com

Jon Stewart or Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Corner.

And for the first time, Stanford won! They are awesome. Go watch a few.

Feature right must always be better right?  John from Zumboni guest blogs at GigaOm, talking about the super phone. In it he makes the argument for a new class of phones that is higher in feature / function than a smart phone calling the smart phones.

Then view this piece in NY Times by David Pogue on an “email only device” the Peek.”

Also view this $20 (no long term contracts) phone from Spice. It has numbers, a speaker and a microphone – no display BTW. There’s another company making a $10 phone (again, this is the unlocked phone, no contracts).

This is the new digital “divide”. A phone with everything for someone and another with only one thing for everyone (well, everyone that wants email that is).

I am always reminded of the microwave at home, which has a clock display. Now, 90% of homes in India, turn their microwaves “off” when not in use. So the “clock feature” is mostly useless.

For over 80% of the “non power users”, the basic 3-5 features are the ones they use 80% of the time. Get that right and the rest is just gravy (OR useless depending on your viewpoint).

Here is my team.

QB: Matt Hasselbeck (Seattle)
RB: Marion Barber (Dallas)
WR: Santana Moss (Washington) and Terrell Owens (Dallas) – yeah I know, once a 49er’ always one.
TE: Tony Gonzalez (Kansas City)
Defense : Ravens
K: Matt Stover (Baltimore)

I am doing okay, in my league, won 2 lost 1.

I changed the name from BuzzGain DoItYourselfers. What is yours?

Google Docs.

More money. Check.
Bigger name. Check.
More resources. Check.

Must be better?

Save a large file on Google Docs? (Sorry).

Zoho Writer absolutely beats the pants out of Google. If you have to save large files (which I just had to). I got kicked out of Google 4 times. Gave up.

Went to Zoho writer. No problem.

Zoho has THE best office productivity suite on the cloud. By far. Bar none.

Clear and to the point – writing in plain English.

Summary:
a) Use common, everyday words

b) Use “you” and other
personal pronouns

c) Use “must” instead of
“shall”

d) Avoid using undefined technical
terms

e) Use positive rather than negative
words

f) Avoid using gender-specific
terminology

g) Avoid long strings of nouns

Verb Forms:
h) Use active voice

i) Use action verbs

j) Use the present tense

Structure:
k) Use parallel construction

l) Be direct

m) Avoid using unnecessary exceptions

Seems to be a week of great diagrams, information and analysis. Paul points us to this great graphic of venture capital distributions in the US by state. The most surprising part is the participation of Colorado and Utah. Who woudda thunk it?

Smart Money Map of the Market is a must view daily for everyone looking to get a birds eye view of wall street. Its an interactive graphic with the top news and trends in a single page.

Will asked yesterday for the China graphic, and I thought it would be good to see the relative spend India and China on the same items. Needless to say China is WAY ahead on every item in terms of consumption.

Below is the spending on various goods and services for India from the NY times article, but their graphic is MUCH better.

Great NYT interactive flash graphic on how much people spend on Electronics, Clothing, Alcohol & tobacco, Household goods and recreation the world over. Its a pseudo world map with relative sizes of spending depicted by the size of the box.

Its clear the developed nations have the lions share of the spend, but its very revealing to see the size of recreation spend.

hat tip. Flowing data is one of my favorite blogs BTW.