You are currently providing two key personal services
1. You are reviewing a variety of sources for what you consider to be interesting (2500 per day apparently)
2. You are then merging your own personal opinions in with the “best-of” ideas that you have reviewed.

I am sure that the sources you review are based on an extensive review of the types of content they put out. Most people will not have the time to do that type of analysis let alone the 4-5 hours daily scanning.

Services like Digg help people find popular content. However, many online users go to the names that they trust offline. These are names like Covey, Peters, Buckingham, Fiorina, Gerstner, etc… These days many of those luminaries and their surrounding “people” are putting out content in a digital format.

Any thoughts about how this “luminary” content could be aggregated to create a stream per luminary or even aggregate by concept across luminaries?

This goes a bit against the democratization of the internet where anybody can have a good idea and see it rise to prominence. We are already pre-filtering by some sort of “luminary filter”, which means that until you are a luminary, your ideas are not included. However, it seems that this pre-filter would help the knowledge worker who has 4-5 minutes rather than 4-5 hours to review online feeds.

I am curious to hear your thoughts, but for now I am going to assume you see some merit so let’s talk about how the aggregation might be accomplished. There are services like xfruits that aggregate muliple feeds into a single feed for an end user, but how about on the backend? Are there tools that will help a service combine private content with multiple streams of public content based around a particular luminary and offer it up as a customizable feed service where the service provider and the luminary can earn some income?

Perhaps some of the public content comes through full-access and then other elements are just stubs that require a subscription. Similar to the way Yahoo Finance has gone.

Swan

Then when I go into my regular feeds I do a lot of pre-scanning as well. I don’t get to read all of the different articles, not because I may not be interested, but more than anything else because I like coming back to them. So I quickly scan as well the ones I am interested and the other ones would go away. So from all of that scanning and filtering, I don’t think it is 6 / hours, like you suggest, would have to time myself one day, but more along the 4 to 5 hours a day, which in between meetings, conference calls and whatever other tasks sounds like quite reasonable to me.

Should I cut on my feed reading? Probably, perhaps I would be doing that over the next few weeks as my interests have narrowed down quite a bit lately. Thus over the next few months I bet that listing would go down.

Must say I was surprised to actually see the above comment coming from you, since I thought, you, above anyone else, would be getting exposed to a whole lot more than I do and still keep everything under control. Perhaps you could share with us how you get to digest feeds on a daily basis. I would love to know, as I am sure I may be able to learn a trick or two!

Thanks ever so much for the feedback comments!

In my last big contract the outcomes were pretty clear: the plane lands (and the passengers go on their way, happy) or it crashes (NOT!).

“you said that you scan 2,500 articles each morning!” … oh, really. Let’s say 10 seconds each. Let’s say eyes-to-monitor 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour … no interruptions, no reading, no forwarding. C’mon … really … you can keep that up 6 or 7 hours a day?! C’mon … really …