I’m more up to date on news and IT information than ever before, but I feel more overwhelmed with information than ever. I read periodicals, email blasts, blogs via RSS and try to keep up with links from friends. These days, the very best articles, blogs and videos I see are those tweeted, facebooked, or directly emailed to me.

Yesterday, one tweet directed me to this blog, “Are blogs losing their authority to the statusphere”. It is a great analysis of what is happening in the blogosphere and how Technorati, the leading blog directory and search engine, may be losing its authority. Bloggers are now spending less time commenting and linking on blogs and more time doing the same on social networking sites.

Over the last day or so, I’ve been doing a lot of research on a couple of IT topics. The best information is absolutely not on the usual suspects, CIO, Information Week and Gartner. It is out in unknown blogs, blogs of people I don’t usually follow. It took a lot of digging to find it. Over the last couple of weeks, the most interesting unsolicited articles I’ve read were not ones from my RSS reader or other subscriptions, but those that people sent to me thinking I’d be interested.

Meanwhile, a CIO at lunch yesterday asked what we need to teach kids in school these days … to exaggerate only a little, he provocatively suggested students don’t need to learn anything anymore, since it is all available at their fingertips. My response was they need to learn discernment to know what’s accurate, and that they need to learn frameworks to help classify all the bits of data and information into knowledge, understanding and wisdom (to borrow from the systems thinkers). Then I got home, read this blog, and wondered if part of what they really need to learn is who to add to their trusted network so they get the right tweets, Facebook updates and LinkedIn posts…

So, “@sairy, thanks for the tweet on blogs losing their authority in the statusphere … this was a good one, and better than I could have found by “ (oops, out of twitter characters, so on to my next topic)