I read Robert Scoble's post on "noise in the net" with morbid curiousity today. It's a pretty interesting post, really. Seriously.

Oh, the glorious noise! Everyone loves beating me up for causing the noise. No, I am not the cause. I pass it along. You should see my inbound streams. Every second or two a new Twitter is aimed at me. Every few seconds, a new blog post comes into Google Reader. Every few seconds, a new thing on FriendFeed.

Scoble then goes on to give a few ideas on how to get past the noise and make some sense out of it all. The suggestions are OK, but not really great. They're really more thoughtlets than anything useful.

Irony on 'Roids
Anyhow, do you want to know something really ironic? I was just about to remove him from my twitter "follow" list, precisely because the amount of noise and gunk that he's been generating has been enormous, and the value has been ... well, not enormous.

Sort of like the opposite of Dolby Noise Reduction ... but maybe worse. He not only passes along the noise, he adds more to it and injects back into the same stream, making it go from meta-stable to insanity inducing.

Sort of a human positive feedback loop. As in this excerpt (from the linked article)

A system in equilibrium in which there is positive feedback to any change in its current state is said to be in an unstable equilibrium ... the end result of a positive feedback is often amplifying and "explosive", i.e. a small perturbation results in big changes.

Uggh.

I know we're trying to figure out how this can all work, be helpful and all that, BUT ... is that really a good model for social communication? Then out of all that gunk he comes up with something interesting.

Maybe I'll wait until tomorrow to break the loop...