Predicting the future

This looks like a really old post (I mean, it's from 2009 for goodness sake). Stay for the retro vibes but be aware any information in this post is likely way out of date.

From the Newark Daily Advocate on March 25, 1893:

Every person of fairly good education and of restless mind writes a book. As a rule, it is a superficial book, but it swells the bulk and it indicated the cerebral unrest that is trying to express itself. We have arrived at a condition in which more books are printed than the world can read. This is true not only of books that are not worth reading, but it is true of the books that are.

All this I take to be the result of an intellectual affranchisement that is new, and of a dissemination of knowledge instead of concentration of culture. Everybody wants to say something. But it is slowly growing upon the world that everybody has not got something to say. Therefore one may even at this moment detect the causes which will produce reaction. In 100 years there will not be so many books printed, but there will be more said. That seems to me to be inevitable.

If you replace book with blog, this chap has the current state of play down to a tee. Even down to the realisation that not everyone writing something is worth reading, but also that there are so many good writers that you just can't keep up.

This totally mirrors my online reading habits at the moment. I've gone from a huge selection of websites in my rss reader to a very select few. Additionally the frequency with which I check them has dropped from checking every day to maybe once a week or fortnight. Mainly I think I have Twitter to thank for this. By selecting the right people to follow I can quickly dip into any breaking industry news or new techniques as it's guaranteed at least one of those people will tweet it. The remainder of the posts in my rss feed can now be saved for later as I know they are unlikely to be time-sensitive. Ironically, as the time I have to catch up on these posts tends to be when I'm away from my computer, I publish them into slim books (via Lulu and only for my use), but at least I know these writings are worth reading.