I write blog posts here that get tweetscanned to twitter that then end up on friendfeed where people comment.  The friendfeed feed gets pushed back to Bloglines where I can then read about what people thought about the original post.  The comments don’t stay with the original post.  Some of the twitters are captured in direct messages to me, others are duplicated with the post in friendfeed, and other twitters aren’t attached to the entry at all.  Only a few people find their way back to the blog to leave the comment because that’s not where the conversation is. 

This circle of information is enough to make me dizzy and I’m the one who set it up.

I’m not the only one who’s working like this.  My friends and contacts are trying these services — some are signed up for everything, others only have an email address and a blog.  Me?  I track all this activity through readers and lifestream aggregators.  I thought my base of operations was my RSS reader, but now I see that’s not good enough.  Entire conversations are happening outside of the blogs I follow and I’m missing a good portion of the value I found with these sources in the first place. Social media services are folding in on themselves, consolidating and re-syndicating the same information.   It’s the echo chamber writ large.

I’m wrestling with how to follow people with the minimum amount of overlap.  In other words, I don’t want to see the same post repeated on friendfeed, plaxo, twitter, et al, but I do want to see all the comments and responses.  I can ignore the duplicates, of course, but that’s tiring.  I need a source filter — one post, one view, distillation of the flow around a conversation. 

I’ll muddle through it for a while.  How are others dealing with the information firehose?  Thanks!