As I get ready for a trip, I found myself in front of my computer this evening picking-n-choosing podcasts to subscribe to and load on my iPod. Since I’m so busy and have so much content to prioritize and consume — and generate myself with my blog and podcast — that it’s been a few months since I really took the time to poke around iTunes and see what’s there.

Holy Schnikey! I hadn’t realized that there was such an enormous wealth of new stuff. TV news, public radio and more has flooded the iTunes podcast section. Though I should probably pay closer attention, I hadn’t and was a bit stunned.

Since I usually like thought provoking podcasts, public radio is more to my taste than alot of other content. IT Conversations is another favorite as is the Social Innovation network.

This reminded me of my post from January of last year entitled, “Information Overload: Can You See What’s Coming?” that said in part:

The river of content is flowing faster and faster. This river of content available on the internet is reaching flood stage and is in a variey of media types. As newspapers, magazines, radio and television lose eyeballs to the internet and become ever more desperate to cling to their advertisers, they are finding increasingly garish and dumbed down methods of getting the attention of the eyeball owners back (which, in my view, will only push people away faster).

As broadband continues its adoption and more people get on the internet and attempt to connect their own dots, it’s becoming exponentially more difficult to see or tap in to the collective consciousness and stay on top of changes in an industry, area of interest, or even to stay relevant in the workplace. Primarily it’s more difficult to understand change and to see disruptive technologies or business models coming…and having time to act.

Even entertainment options are accelerating. There are more DirecTV channels than I could ever watch. I’ve pared down the number of shows I TiVo since I could barely keep up with what I really wanted to watch. I recently took out a machete to my RSS aggregator to cut down the number of blogs I track (currently over 200) and news sources (35). It was becoming too much and I just felt anxiety over all of it.

In his book “The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less“, Barry Schwartz argues that the proliferation of choices essentially causes us to be paralyzed with indecision.

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