It’s interesting to me how once a topic surfaces, it seems to shake itself out in a variety of places. That’s what seems to have happened around the topic of RSS for me. Last week at Translator lab hours we landed in an interesting discussion about RSS and the collective’s use of the tool. At a presentation @suespaight and I were lucky to be a part of last Friday at @c2gps, the question was asked whether RSS was a viable tactic anymore. And over the weekend, my friend @raffel launched a blog entry about his use of RSS and instruction on how to make the most of it. Check out the post... it’s really good.

While the discussion and questions focused around the technology of RSS and the option as it stands, I think the broader debate is our want, need and ability to filter the overwhelming amount of information available today. RSS is ultimately a filtering device that streamlines our information processing by delivering content to us, rather than us having to go look for it. We connect with the author or publication, find value in the content they provide versus others’ and use RSS to filter their works from the other noise around it. Simple, useful, and powerful.

But I tend to think that tools like RSS, and technologies that deliver content in a specific way, might actually at some point not be a preferred method of filtering. That reliance on our human filters or people in our networks will become the default on how people decide what to pay attention to, and what not too. RSS is an important layer of this filtering, but still every post may not be of interest to me, and I’m still reliant on a “push” of the creator. Where the RSS feed of a site was once a micro set of the information to be consumed, that set has now actually become a macro in itself; it’s a full site of content. Today, we see more and more people turning to Twitter and Facebook and other places where friends point out what may be important for us to pay attention to. I like and trust you, so what you share I assume will be of interest to me. And that isn’t an entire blog or site, but an entry on either. We are more and more offloading our choice of information consumption to our human filters. This tips the scales on what we spend time making decisions on from which content to devour, to which people to follow.

The idea of social media serving as a human filter of information is not new. In fact my first introduction to it was by @armano back in 2008. Read his post, he does a fabulous job explaining, as always. I’ve been fascinated by the phenomenon since, mostly because it taps into the subtle ways social media is changing humans and their expectations. (A phenomenon which I think is grossly underestimated and ignored, btw.) And while the original human filtering idea focused mostly on the switch from relying on technology to relying on people to tell us what is important, I believe this has evolved as well. We have moved beyond just looking for a list of links from our networks. The delivery of a post or article is often distilled to a summation sentence to fit in 140 characters. We accept a single picture, a sentence from a post, or a quote from the author as our total consumption, because that is what was filtered and shared by our trusted sources. Where before the shared links from our friends were the micro in the macro of all the internet, those filtered links today are a type of macro again. We look for the key points, the lesson, the soundbites as value, and may choose our networks based on who most successfully delivers those for us.

So why should we pay attention to this? It’s implications may be widespread. The format in which we create content, the way we approach technology and tool sets, the means in which we disseminate information needs to work in concert with and be developed from this platform of human filtered micro consumption. Don’t get me wrong… we will always continue to share links to posts, and spend the time reading them. But are we missing an opportunity by not recognizing this shift in our behavior? Perhaps. What would/could look different if this “human filtered micro consumption” become the new standard RSS feed? What would we do or build differently?