Recently I got a new pair of trifocals. The optometrist made a strong correction for the astigmatism I have in my right eye. By the end of the first day of wearing them I noticed that the lens for long distance in my right eye was very blurry and not at all 20/20 and was disappointed that I was going to have to take them back and have them redone. Much to my surprise the doctor told me that with that much of a correction what I was experiencing was quite normal as my brain was retraining my eye to accomodate the new lenses.

That gave me pause to think about how something similar is happening to the WWW (World Wide Wasteland) as better filters are adapting to handle all the information overflow. Big Think is sponsoring a conference called Farsight2011,streaming liveFebruary1: http://bigthink.com/ideas/26593. You can ask questions ahead of time by visiting the link.

I am taking an online class taught by Howard Rheingold, called MindAmplification to help me sort out all this out:

http://socialmediaclassroom.com/host/mindamplifier/wiki/main-page

Howard is a master of digital alchemy and I am really looking forward to learning from him.

Another thing happening to aid in all this overload is the advent of curators and cybrarians (http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-02-25-overdue25_ST_N.htm). Two promising platforms for curation are: curated.by (http://www.curated.by) and Pearltrees (http://www.pearltrees.com/). Curated.by is like working with the catalogs in any library, while Pearltrees takes a visual approach similar to mindmapping. Both are great tools, I prefer curated.by as my mind works that way, my collaborator in our curation endeavors prefers Pearltrees, as he has been mindmapping for more than 20 years. Different strokes…

There is another layer being added to the blogoshphere called blogmarking. If you are a blogger, several sites are offering platforms:

http://blogengage.com/, http://www.bizsugar.com/, http://blokube.com/ and http://www.designfloat.com/

Two more tools for the digital highway:

http://www.pushnote.com Comment on sites and send notes directly to friends

http://www.netvibes.com Create your own dashboards for anything you are interested in.

Can’t keep up with it all? No sweat. It will all be there tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.

Enjoy!