TMI!!!

As I sat down at the computer tonight, I thought that I had a reasonable plan for making some measurable progress on my little “side project”, that for now, will remain “eyes only – top secret”.  And, I suppose the night is still young, but already I feel it slipping away from me.  The reason?  An absolute fire hose of information, courtesy of just a few Tweets.  In rapid succession, I clicked through three Guy Kawasaki Tweets that linked to stories on his Alltop site that I found fascinating:

Five megatrends that you can’t ignore http://om.ly/axEk

Ten things social media can’t do http://om.ly/axVr

13 small-business social networking sites you probably never heard of http://om.ly/azai

The first two articles led me to subscribe to the RSS feeds for both of the originators of the content.  The third article prompted me to actually sign up for one of the small business social networking sites (check it out:  http://sta.rtup.biz/profile/JeffGraves ).

After absorbing all that great content, I spent 20 minutes searching for other interesting posts and people to follow on Twitter on my “secret project” account.  About 19 minutes into that exercise, I realized that there is just an endless supply of good, relevant, interesting content to consume, and if I were home 7 days a week with nothing else to do, I STILL wouldn’t make a dent in it.

Back when I was in school at WPI, I remember reading an article about the worker of the future, a classification that the writer called the “gold collar worker”.  The key to being a “gold collar worker”, as I recall the article saying, was not necessarily knowing things, but knowing how to FIND things – sort of a 21st century Radar O’Reilly, or in today’s terms, a human Google.  Speaking of Google, I just Googled “gold collar worker”, and have discovered that someone was kind enough to put an entry into Wikipedia regarding our friend the Gold Collar Worker!  According to Wikipedia, Robert Earl Kelley coined the phrase in his 1985 book The Gold-Collar Worker: Harnessing the Brainpower of the New Work Force, although I have no idea if the article that I read (it was probably circa 1986) was written by Kelley or someone else.

After all that, I decided I just HAD to write a post about all of this…and here I am, nearly 2 hours into tonight’s work session, and not one of the tasks I had intended to chip away at complete.  However, I do feel better educated, I’ve identified some new resources that I’m pretty sure might come in handy on my project, and I even managed to submit this post.

OK, off to work…unless that post by Tara Hunt that’s calling my name in Google Reader distracts me…