Confronted with a large flow of incoming information I automated a way to limited to a fix number of messages corresponding to the time I wish to spend. Twitter, facebook and Linkedin to start with followed by emails, newsletters and RSS feeds. Altogether I would spend a day reading the news. Read in RSS mode prevent ads, heavy pages taking time to load but alos offer too many distractions. I tend to keep one newspaper in my list but the truth is that I feel and do better when I don’t check it. Either important, dramatized and disturbing news or minor distracting informations not worth reading. Reading others blog or twitter stream. There is a benefit in engaging dialogues in comments but not just for sake of engaging. I will comment only if the post correspond to subjects I am really interested in and when I have some knowledge to share. For this reason the freshness of the post is rarely a incentive for reading it in priority. Twitter must be filtered out by whatever people tweet to keep it busy. Like for spam I will have a few filters to filter out some automated posts like foursquare, vimeo, wordpress. Wordpress tweets are removed by a general rule of authority. If I follow both the blog and in twitter the tweet will be filtered out. This means that all shortned URL will be replaced by their long urls. This allows mean to guess from the URI to where it points. Normal change of colour will occur if I have already been there, it will prevent me to visit trash news sites. I am also following search streams. This is tricky because it is not curated by anyone. It is usually a good starting point for discovery. I found like this bloggers within my field, reference sites. Search stream must also be heavily trimmed based on experience. This must be done stream by stream. Ideally the system should learn automatically but I found that a few rules reduce already dramatically (50%). Cross posting filtering. Using the rule of autority precedence tweets in search are removed if they where already included in timelines. Now there are days or times when the number of interesting news is not reached. In such case newspapers will typically fill with chien écrasé, news from agencies, background articles. I do something similar by placing forward high valued news from past days. Newsletters are redirected as an rss funnel The result is a simple page based on a merged rss. I can click on read more to get to the original item. All this was chien écrasés, marronniers in english