Vanessa Fox. Nude.

I’m usually really good about keeping up on what’s going in in the world around me through my RSS feeds. Lately though, with all the travel and work and sitting on the balcony watching the seals, I’ve been getting behind in my reading. I seem to be keeping up OK though, just by skimming Sphinn, Techmeme, and my Facebook newsfeed. And surprisingly, I seem to get a lot of news lately from Twitter.

The Twitter-Only View
So, I wondered, what if I only got news through Twitter. How lopsided would my world view be? I suppose this experiment would be very different for everyone, because unlike a similar experiment with something like Sphinn, the news you get depends very heavily on who you’re following.

As I mentioned the other day, I recently started having some Twitters sent to my phone, but I primarily still keep up using the web interface. Twitter by phone is great for random messages from close friends (”we’re having dinner at my house, who wants to come over?”), but the web seems to work much better for following everyone else. For one thing, it’s much easier to click on links people post when I’m not driving in my car at 60mph.

So what does the world look like through Twitter? Actually, pretty comprehensive! Sure, maybe what people are having for dinner and where they’re shopping isn’t exactly news, but here are things I learned in just the last few days:

• Cornel West’s musical attempt is not all that
• The new Firefox update might be a bit buggy
• Radiohead’s experiment in online album distribution appears to be working
• The micro startup is hot in Seattle
• I went to Natala’s for dinner last night — oh wait, I probably would know that without Twitter
• Jason Calcanis feels lonely even on stage and needs people to call him
• There’s great librarian resources I may not know about which should be great for the writing I do for Information Today magazine
• Web 2.0 Summit was attended by a lot of people in suits
• SMX Social Media had lots of great tidbits
• Nashville had a tornado scare
• China started redirecting searches to Baidu
• Email wants to compete with social networks (although I don’t really get Yahoo’s “friend finder” idea that calculates who your real friends are based on your email patterns. Don’t I already know what friends I email a lot?)

All in all, not a bad view of the world. I like that the people I follow aren’t reading the same sites as I am so I get much more variety the types of news than I might if I just read my feeds.

A Facebook Perspective
My Facebook news feed has potential too (particularly if enough people add the new Google News Facebook application). My current feed is:

• telling me about those ridiculous Dallas Cowboys who thought they were paying $275 rather than $275k for cowboy.com and want a refund
• showing me new pics from the DMA conference
• pointing me at this super cool visualization of the Gonzales testimony
• letting me know that a friend of mine is setting up his slingbox (so maybe I can ask him how it went and get help setting up mine!)
• breaking the news that it’s not Christmas
• explaining how I can get site visitors from posting a comment on Reddit
• describing how to measure user engagement
• alerting me that a lot of people want me to be a vampire

Augment all that with Sphinn hot topics and Searchcap to keep me up-to-date on search, with a little Techmeme tossed in for good measure, and I’m set.

In a world of information overload, with everyone jumping on the crowdsourcing bandwagon, why not take advantage of others to do the work of sorting through it all for you!