Robert Scoble makes the distinction between news and noise. Journalists listen to the noise, sort it out, and produce news. Scoble says "I used to be a news junkie, but I’ve hung out with the world’s top journalists enough now to see that the good ones are noise junkies," so he's gone there, too, and by going there, he's watching stories emerge before they're "news."

It's like unfiltered awareness before discrimination sets in. Discrimination is what journalists do to be useful, but the unfiltered awareness is the path to nirvana.

Lately I've been listening to the noise and making sense of it on a larger scale - i.e. my thinking (and discriminating) isn't finding its way into my blog or other content streams because 1) the work itself is taking all my time and 2) it's too big to have resolved into something I can write about yet. I'm working two paths, social web and sustainability, and they seem to be converging. I'll have more to say soon.

At Social Media Club last week, David Armistead and I made a well-received and, I think, pretty good presentation about the new world of dis-organization, but in my part of the presentation, where I gave examples before David talked about theory and potential, I tried to cram too much, and it was hard in the time I had to tie it all together. So I'm learning to be cautious about trying to express my thinking when my head's still too full, and too much of it is still noise.