Q: What do news and food have in common?
A: Both news and food are commodities found in overabundance in our modern society.

Food and News are Free

Well, food isn't exactly free, but we spend a spend a decreasing portion of our collective resources as a society working to put food on the table. While access to food remains a serious problem in poor nations, mechanization of agriculture has given us the ability to mass-produce food here in the developed world. Similarly, mechanization of information storage and transmissions technologies have lowered the costs of getting news. The profit incentive of our industrial economy only further encourages innovations that increase quantities while shrinking costs.

Abundance Begets Overconsumption

As a result of these conditions, we have created an epidemic of both obesity and information overload in our society. No matter how much the supply of a good expands, our human biology places limits on the resources we can consume. I'm sure you've already heard much about the modern obesity epidemic, but the information overload epidemic is argubly as important and has only recently begun receiving attention.

So, how do we cultivate healthy news consumption? Below are three key factors as applied to Diffbot; but the same principles apply to whatever tools you choose to use in your own personal information regimen. Those three key factors are: what to consume, how much to consume, and when to consume.

1. What to consume

"You are what you read."

Like any well-balanced food diet, we need to be selective in managing our information diets. A good information diet includes trustworthy sources and a mix of viewpoints. Diffbot gives you the unique ability to be selective with your information sources—by letting you create a news stream out of a specific webpage, instead of relegating yourself to only organizations that publish feeds. Even if a feed exists, it may not be for the sub-section of the site that you are interested in.

2. How much to consume

"Never eat more than you can lift"

Managing sheer volumes against the natural desire to consume more is a constant internal battle. The main problem with how news is currently consumed is that news outlets and aggregators bundle together stories that they think you care about instead of information that you actually care about. The reader needs to separate the wheat from the chaff (no pun intended), and this results in a lot of wasted time spent skimming over content. An essential part of any information management system is automated tools for filtering of incoming infostreams. Diffbot's filters let you watch just the section of the page you care about, and enable you to exclude news items based on keywords or other criteria.

3. When to consume

"All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast"

Besides what you read and how much you read, when you read your news is also critical. Just as dietitians recommend eating a hearty breakfast and small meals throughout the day, information processing also has its natural cycles throughout the day. In order to foster productive flow, your information tool should let you timeshift your reading so that you can choose to read on your own schedule, not the news source's schedule. Tools like Diffbot give you the flexibility to browse a time-sorted archive magazine at your leisure, a mobile version when you are on the train, or configure email alerts for things you need to know immediately.

Let's get back to the basics. The underlying ideals that we should strive for are not more food or news, but better health and cognitive effectiveness. To that end, let's use technology to help combat, instead of further the problems of information overconsumption.

Diffbot will be demoing our new product at SFBeta this Tuesday. If you're near San Francisco, come by and try our new tech, meet the team, and tell us about your Diffbot experience. The event will be at the 111 Minna Gallery.

Thanks to all our users that voted and helped us win the People's Choice Award. For more information and to register for the event, check out sfbeta.com.

a lot of work goes into diffbot behind the scenes so sometimes it makes it hard to communicate our efforts and progress to family, friends and diffbot users.

one goal we've strived for is to try and improve diffbot each week. i think we've done well so far this summer, just need to do a better job of explaining what those changes are on our blog (and hope those changes were prioritized correctly).

lately, our changes have been pretty visible. our article section is much cleaner and easier to read. people follow a lot of sources, and diffbot should make reading these updates as simple and clean as possible.

our permalink and context pages have also been updated, to provide more real estate for what you care about when reading your personal news.

we'll be slowly revamping our home pages to better reflect our latest product, and cleaning up the dashboard a bit more as we keep pushing hard on "removing" the interface, and letting your sources speak for themselves.

A lot of our users primarily use Diffbot via the free RSS feeds that we generate using our feedbeater product. We are happy to announce that we have implemented Google's Pubsubhubbub protocol for all of our RSS feeds.

What this means is that those of you using Diffbot through 3rd party services will get your updates from Diffbot in real-time now. For example, as soon as Diffbot finds a change on your favorite webpage, we push a notification to Google that tells Google to pull in the update into your Google Reader account. Here's a list of popular clients that support Pubsubhubbub.

a lot of work goes on behind the scenes at diffbot. unfortunately, long time spans go by and users only benefit from the most visible and short term impact work that we push out to the site.

it's a tough balancing act, and we know that we can do better. for example, working just on long term vision doesn't allow us to iterate on our ideas with real users.

one way we can bridge this gap between our users and our work is to just let the small tidbits come out. for example, last week we finally got facebook's latest apis working with our articles. only a handful of users use it right now, but we're happy to have it finally working, and maybe you'ld like to give it a try?

one nice thing about our integration with facebook is that when you share items on your wall, it allows your friends to see the source you are following, so they too can decide if they want to follow the source themselves, or to continue to use you as their source.

for this week, i've just pushed out an improved twitter sharing service and our updated mobile site. The mobile site is relatively light weight, but it is finger accessible for those with fancy new touch screens, or button accessible for those with blackberries and old winMo phones.

In the meantime, we're hard at work on the long term vision and balancing that with small improvements that can make everyone's diffbot use a little more easier and a little more fun!

As always, feedback is most welcome!