Now I know what you are saying, Twitter and information overload often go hand and hand. I completely agree. It’s extremely difficult to keep up with. That is why I love Tweetie 2, specifically it’s integration with Instapaper. Now I never used Instapaper before but signing up is really easy. Now when I’m browsing through my Twitter feed and I see something that looks interesting I can post it to Instapaper to read later. This is very useful because I often don’t have time to read everything that looks interesting.

When I do find time to catch up on all my design news, I go to my Instapaper site and open each clipping into it’s own tab. I start reading everything and if something is especially good then I save it to my Delicious account. This allows me to go back through my “design library” in case I need that page again. It’s a wonderful system that I have going.

Before Instapaper I would favorite links through Twitter to read later but this isn’t exactly what the feature was made for. I’d have to clean out my favorite tweets after I caught up on things. There is no cleaning out Instapaper. When you click on a link to read Instapaper automatically takes the link out of the queue and archives it.

It’s now super easy to stay on top of everything I want to because of Twitter, Tweetie 2, Instapaper and Delicious. If your a designer or if you follow any kind of niche subject I would try this kind of system out.

In a typical day I consume a lot of information. Throughout the day I scan blogs, Twitter feeds and occasionally jump into my RSS reader. This is mostly all design and technology related information and not what you would call traditional news. When it comes to world news I have a single top story widget on my iGoogle page from MSNBC and if a headline catches my eye I’ll check the story out. Every morning I get an email from the News & Observer showing me the top headlines for NC State and the Carolina Hurricanes. If a headline peaks my interest I’ll read the full story and then typically navigate away from the N&O. Sometimes I listen to podcasts throughout the day but the ones I subscribe to rarely contain any news in the traditional sense. While in the car as I travel to and from work I have local sports radio on. This totals to maybe 30 minutes a day but radio is full of commercials so I typically only get 10-15 minutes of real content and opinion. In the evening I religiously watch Pardon the Interruption. I am a big sports fan and the PTI format is great for getting a good mix of the day’s top stories. After PTI is finished I rarely if ever consume any more news for the day.

So lets summarize my typical day. I actively find specialized content that really interests me (design & tech news). I let information that I’m casually interested in become the background noise of my day (sports). I ignore everything else because I believe that if an item of news is truly important it will find me.

So now I pose the question to you… what is your typical day when it comes to information consumption? If you have a free minute write a comment below describing your typical day when it comes to news and information. Try to touch on the kind of content you encounter and the medium you use to engage with it. If the content is delivered to you then how? Would you consider yourself a light news reader or a news junkie? I’m hoping that responses will help me paint a better picture of how people consume news and this will hopefully lead me to better design.

The key to all this is linking back to my site. External links are so crucial in SEO. Not just any old link but quality external links. Links that contain my name and are found on a page that relates to me are extremely valuable. My public Facebook page won’t show a link to my site so that is a bummer, but all the other ones do. Having external pages with “Les James” in the title and a well written link pointing to my site should push me over the edge to number one. This weekend Facebook is going to start handing out user names so I’ll be sure to grab the lesjames handle (this will allow me to have “lesjames” in the facebook url). Every little reference should help. I don’t remember being late to the Gmail party but from day one all the user names that contained my name were gone so I went with my gamer handle of Serak. So having Serak003 in the url instead of lesjames doesn’t do me any favors but we’ll see where this Google profile gets me. I am led to believe that the profile will show up in the search results so we’ll see.

I have pointed back to each of these pages in the footer of my site (see icons next to the about me blurb). Linking out to these sites probably won’t boost me but at least it points the spider in the right direction. If I think of anything else I’ll be sure to update this post but for now I just have to play the waiting game. Watch out you other Les’s out there! Yea you the musician in San Fran and the personal trainer in New York, I’m out to get you. As for the 1919 Australian rules footballer on Wikipedia, I guess you are safe for now.