(UPDATE, February 15: Just wanted to let you know that there will likely be no new entry from me today. Why? Well, because I'm attending an all-day workshop by Adobe instead, down in the Loop, concerning their brand-new Production Studio! Cool! Anyway, full report on that tomorrow, along with my underwhelming experience at Yahoo Personals' little Starbucks event, mentioned at the end of this entry.)

Well, okay, only four days now since I got a home broadband connection for the first time in my life, and I'm already discovering something that I'm sure a lot of you are already familiar with; namely, now that I have all this incredible power at my disposal, now that I have a world full of information at my fingertips, now that a lot of this information already is getting delivered to my desktop, in real time on a second-to-second basis, the whole thing can just easily overwhelm you to the point of not getting anything done at all. I mean, seriously, take last night around 9 pm for me as an example: Check out 50 new Flickr images from my contacts? Respond to 8 emails sitting in my inbox? Read the 200 new items in my RSS account? Get more of my 2,000 old journal entries ready for importation? Start a chat with one of my 14 friends currently online themselves? Or just throw my hands in the air, say 'fuck it' and watch CSI: Miami instead? (Guess which option I chose.)

There can definitely be something dismal about the prospect of ever-updating streams of information, as anyone who's been confronted at work with 100 new emails every morning can tell you. And in fact I'm starting to hear statements of this kind on a more and more regular basis, whenever I discuss the subject with friends and strangers in the real world; how we might get to talking about mobile devices, for example, when the other person will suddenly shrug their shoulders and go, "I don't know. It just really feels to me sometimes that my technology is actually controlling me, not the other way around. I mean, I'm on that damn cellphone every second of the day; it's like I'm a slave to it or something. And I always thought that the point of a cellphone was to free up your life, to give you more personal time than a landlocked phone line would be able to afford you. But man, that sure hasn't happened in my life, anyway."

And boy, I can certainly sympathize with the frustration such a statement belies, as I myself have picked up my first-ever cellphone and first-ever home internet connection over the last two years; and I can certainly understand why a growing amount of people are feeling this way about their tech devices, because I've definitely felt that way at moments in the past too. And the solution, of course, is to reclaim your control over technology, and to not let it push you around; to really understands the ins-and-outs of that technology, in other words, understand the various ways it can work, and then use smart thinking to deploy just the options that make the most sense for your particular life, the ones that complement the way you naturally accomplish things instead of clashing against it. And really, when all is said and done, most complaints about technology taking over a person's life can really be boiled down to that - that the person in question simply isn't using the technology in the right way for them, in fact may be using it in a way that's counter-intuitive to the way the rest of their life works, which is why it's being perceived as such a disruption to them instead of an aide.

An example? Well, let's use the reading of RSS feeds as a good one, since there are in fact so many people now using them, and so many options as far as getting them delivered. Regular readers of course know that I am in fact an RSS junkie, and think it's pretty much the greatest thing since sliced bread; and this is why I'm now subscribed to something like 300 or 400 feeds now at my Bloglines account, and now read (or at least scan) something like 2,000 to 3,000 new pieces of online content each and every day. (And by the way, I offer my feed list at Bloglines as a public page, for anyone else who's curious as to where I find all the things I'm always talking about, both here and at my del.icio.us account; and yes, you can actually export that entire list as an OPML document there too, for transferring into your own RSS reader if you want.)

So, what we're basically talking about with me and RSS is my need to be able to do four things with it: 1) actually read my feeds in a stress-free way; 2) hop immediately over to a short article and read it that moment, if it catches my attention; 3) save the article if it's longer, for reading at a more appropriate time; and 4) point the article in your direction as well, if I feel that it's worth pointing out. And this certainly wasn't impossible for me to do, back during the first year of the account, when I was reading and maintaining it exclusively through my Treo; and that's because Bloglines happens to have a killer mobile version as well, which is why I use it, which presents feeds in this remarkably effective way, allows for one-button saving of items into a "Clippings" folder, one-button clicking for seeing the entire article, etc. But it certainly wasn't a pleasant experience, either, mostly because load times are so slow on mobile devices, and of course you have no cool pop-up windows for immediately clipping an item and then being done with it. Not to mention that I was having to track the entirety of my feeds this way before, even ones for photos and podcast episodes; and these are the kinds of entries that are just a huge pain in the ass to try to open in a mobile browser, which slowed down things even more. And so, for example, before getting this home internet access, it would pretty much take me two hours every morning just to get through all the new items sent to my Bloglines account the evening before; and this doesn't even begin to count actually reading the articles I was interested in, much less compiling the Heterotopia Report by hand once a week and sharing some of them with you too. And this has been fine (if not annoying) as long as I've been unemployed; but if I did have a job to run to every morning, I could easily see RSS feeds turning into the kind of nightmare for me that others attribute to the incessant ringing of their cellphone.

One of the most exciting things for me, however, about getting this new home broadband access, is that it will finally let me treat my mobile device the way my device should've been treated all along - as a simple supplement to my already-existing online life, and not as the only means for living this life in the first place. And so, for example, I was able to remove the dozens of photo and audio feeds this weekend that were formally at my Bloglines account, and track them now through more appropriate services (1001 and Odeo, respectively); and then I was also able to go into the account and mark some of the individual feeds as being "hidden" in the mobile version, yet another killer little option with Bloglines that makes me such a big fan. (So for example, there's a personal blog I read from this woman in Canada named Raymi the Minx, but she posts such a plethora of high-memory photos there that it would most often actually crash my Treo whenever I tried reading it. So now I can just have her feed hidden from my mobile version altogether, and simply interact with it from my desktop instead. You see what I'm saying.) And so this just unto itself has already freed up just a tremendous amount of time in my life; and that's why, for example, it only takes me fifteen minutes now in the morning to zip through all my new Bloglines items from the night before, versus the two hours it was taking me previously. And with the desktop, of course, I now literally can just click open an article the moment I come across it, and if it's short then I can just read it and be done with it; and if I want to point it out to you as well, it's just a matter now of right-clicking on the link and choosing "Send to del.icio.us," versus saving the entire item and hand-typing its URL a week later into my Heterotopia Report.

Ah, but this still leaves the saving of longer articles for later viewing, which is where it suddenly gets tricky; I could, after all, simply bookmark such articles in my local copy of Firefox, or I could send them to del.icio.us as well, or I could download the entire page for later offline viewing, and technically all of these options would work as far as the goal of reading longer articles when I have the spare time. What I've chosen to do, however, is to simply keep sending such articles to the "Clippings" folder at my Bloglines account; and this gets directly into what I was saying before, about how the whole key to using technology efficiently is to start by thinking smartly. Because, see, in my particular life, my typical day is just filled with these little stretches where I have nothing to do, yet must remain in that situation that's causing me to have nothing to do - 45-minute el rides, long waits at stores, a lot of walking from destination to destination, etc. And these are perfect times, frankly, for me to read these longer articles, in a way so that it would both give me something to do during a boring stretch of my day, and not take away from the time I have at home to be doing broadband-appropriate stuff, like watching videos and downloading music, etc., but in a way that might not be appropriate for you at all (for example, if you drive to your destinations instead of walking or taking public transit).

And so if I bookmarked these articles on my home computer, of course, it would kill any chance I'd have to read them on the go; but by doing it the way that I am, in effect it turns my mobile device into a "virtual magazine" on top of everything else, one that I can just whip out wherever I am and be able to read all the articles that I as its virtual editor have placed into it. (And in fact I've talked about this subject in detail before, the idea of RSS turning all of us into little one-person magazine editors; but unfortunately that's part of the old content I keep talking about, that is not yet incorporated into this newest version of my website.) And that's really great, of course, but my main point is that this might not be the best choice for everyone out there; that, in fact, I needed to first sit down and consciously think about all this, do a little work and understand all the options at my disposal, before finally choosing the option that most elegantly complements the way I'm already living my day-to-day life. If I had instead done what most people do with new technology, which is to simply adopt it in the same exact way that some faceless authority figure told me I should adopt it, and to try to maintain it the same way that everyone else is maintaining it...well, then, hell yeah, I could've easily seen myself waving my hands in disgust just a couple of weeks later and muttering, "Well, the hell with you, RSS - you're making my life more difficult, not less."

You always have a choice, when it comes to adopting new technology into your life; you always have the choice to be the master over that technology, instead of the technology itself dictating your lifestyle and actions. As always, it starts with you choosing to be smart about it all; of taking the time to actually learn how that technology works (not the technical details, I mean, but simply what options are available to you), of determining which of these options best complement the life you're already leading, which of them you're going to adopt, which you're going to ignore. It all starts, as I'm often saying here, with you choosing to stand up in public and declare yourself as intelligent - to be able to say to yourself, "You know, I'm actually pretty smart, and I actually do have the ability to teach myself more about these subjects if I want," versus the way the majority of the world's mouth-breathers live their lives, which is to instead publicly declare, "I'm an idiot, and couldn't possibly understand this stuff on my own, so will instead just blindly accept whatever it is that someone in a position of authority tells me, without once even questioning what that is."

Declare your intelligence, people. Declare it loudly, and proudly; and then once you've done so, don't ever look back.

(Planning on writing about today's entry in your own blog? Don't forget to add the tag 'jasonpettus' so that my readers and I will see it too! Also don't forget that you can send me an audio comment regarding today's entry as well, by clicking here.)

Hey, any Chicagoans want to do something extremely silly with me tonight? I found out, in fact, that a group from Yahoo Personals is going to be at the Pipers Alley Starbucks tonight, putting on an "experiential marketing" event in honor of Valentine's Day; that is, if you show up, the group will not only take a photo of you, not only help you write a Yahoo personal ad, but will actually post the ad for free and give you a free $10 Starbucks giftcard. And I thought that just the experience alone would be funny enough, which is why I'm going tonight and will have a whole report about it tomorrow; but then I thought it'd be even funnier to actually leave the finished ad up for awhile as well, just to see what kinds of responses it might get. Because, let's face it, the chances are most likely that it's going to be a bunch of 24-year-old, freshly graduated sorority-girl marketing majors actually running things tonight; and Lord, I just can't wait to see how a bunch of 24-year-old sorority girls will manage to spin my trainwreck of a life into a Yahoo personal ad, suitable for attracting other 24-year-old sorority girls. ("Oh, I see here that you enjoy drug-enhanced group sex with anonymous strangers! We'll just put down, 'Enjoys crowded events.'") Anyway, if anyone else wants to be a part of the hijinks, just drop me a line sometime today!