"As the volume of information rapidly expands, the time to read this information remains relatively static. There are only twenty-four hours in the day; only so much attention to go around. How are you going to get people to read your content? Understanding and planning for how people scan read on the Web is a good start.

A Sunday edition of The New York Times contains more information than was published in the entire 15th Century. Every year, there are 60,000 books and 18,000 magazines published in the United States alone. The Web contains some 600 billion documents.

To survive information overload, people have become incredibly selective in how they consume information. The Web is the ultimate information overload environment and to be effective on the Web, people have developed 'scan reading' behavior." [Gerry McGovern, via LucDesk]

This is very true, and it's one reason I'm so high on news aggregators. So in that spirit, I've set up a poll on OpinionPower asking Should I Truncate My RSS Feed? I know the point of a news aggregator is to scan, but I personally like not having to go to each site to read a whole post.

Which do you prefer? Now's your chance to be heard! As we say in Chicago, vote early and vote often! I'll give it a few days and then announce the results.

"Aaron of Aaronland tells me his site-search engine will return results in RSS too: Try it here..." [Content Syndication with XML and RSS]

This is definitely an idea whose time has come. I hope there's a way to build this into our portal at SLS.