Not Content At All

with the way I receive and distribute information.  I am constantly thinking of ways to better streamline my life and to have better filters for the info I receive…lots of room for improvement and would love to hear from readers with ideas.

Now that I am back in town I have about 6 papers, ideas, and pieces I’d like to publish in some form or another and not real sure how to do it…

That Way I Receive Information

I want resources that make my life easier, not more difficult.  The web, for the most part does the opposite for me in that I get blasted with more (but less relevant) info than less (but more relevant) info.  Most financial websites, in an attempt to accumulate as many pageviews and thus revenue, do the exact opposite of what I want.  While I have friends at most of these sites, I would take Abnormal Returns 1000x over the site that does 350 posts/day and another site that has over 4000+ contributors.

One difficulty here is the scatterbrained way in which I get my info, which currently consists of:

-Subscribing to 20+ magazines that get read mostly on the exercise bike or airplane,

-ordering 70+ books from Amazon per year, reading/skimming them and returning/selling probably two thirds,

-visiting the blogs on the blogroll sporadically (maybe weekly unless linked elsewhere, and I hate RSS readers),

-using Instapaper for longer form posts and reads,

-going to Abnormal Returns everyday,

-reading Twitter and getting frustrated that I can’t seem to save links easily,

-reading new papers on SRRN (usually linked by CXO),

-reading Ned Davis everyday, etc etc.

I need a better process for this.  #1 is the inability to have a single resource for reading the manager commentary/research from the institutional crowd in one place.  I originally designed Hedge Fund Letters to do this but it became a distraction as it required MORE effort not less to update, etc.  I’ve been playing around with Scoopit and some other ideas for curation and aggregation but no simple answers yet.  Fire over any ideas you have…

The Way that I Distribute Information

This is equally as big of a challenge for me.  So far I have experimented with :

-publishing academic articles, but the drawback is looong cycle time, and limited review audience,

-posting to SSRN, although I feel like the audience is limited,

-publishing books, but the publishing model is dead as my friend James has pointed out so many times (although PushPop is interesting),

-writing for third party websites, but the relationship is one-sided, and most sites I don’t want to be associated with (ie noise machines),

-writing the blog, but the format is not suitable to longer form pieces which is my biggest interest (although I am going to attempt a 20 page piece here next week to see what it looks like).

Would love to hear any suggestions for improving/streamlining either process.  And an update, I just bought a MacBook Pro and an Ipad 2 and loving both so far…

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