The full quote is actually “the world is the size of a conference room now” as spoken by Robert Scoble, whose recent presentation is up on Stealthmode.  I will warn you – the video of his presentation is almost an hour long, but only parts of it need to be seen.  The rest can be absorbed through the audio, so you can simply play it in the background while you’re working (as I did this morning).  I found the video through a link on Robert’s blog post about reading, which – combined with the video of how he uses Google Reader – addresses one of the things I’ve been wondering about for a while now: information absorption.  Maybe that’s not a good phrase.  Specifically, I want to know how to select, filter and keep all the (relevant!) information out there in some sort of useful form.

Or maybe the appeal of RSS readers and the like is even simpler than that – maybe we’re all just trying to stay in the loop.  As an “information professional” it’s hard to know which loop or loops to stay in; the organization of information is only one aspect of what we (librarians) do.  The content of that information is another issue altogether.  I know several fellow students in my library program who were drawn to the degree because it was the closest they could get to a sort of Renaissance-Scholar education … meaning, we want to be well-versed in a lot of different areas because we see the overarching connections between all these fields.  When you learn a classification scheme, you get the chance to learn a little about everything from political science to theology to literature to  astronomy.  Granted, we’re only learning enough about these other fields to sort it out into some sort of ordered schema of human knowledge, but that’s a start.  Sometimes, though, I do feel like this classification side gets in the way of the content side.