Welcome to the home of Noah Brier. I'm the co-founder of Variance and general internet tinkerer. Most of my writing these days is happening over at Why is this interesting?, a daily email full of interesting stuff. This site has been around since 2004. Feel free to get in touch. Good places to get started are my Framework of the Day posts or my favorite books and podcasts. Get in touch.

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Mastering Data

Quite humbled to be included in Navneet Alang’s piece on what he calls Masters of Data. As part of the piece I was asked how I deal with the information onslaught:

“How I personally handle the glut, is that I just don’t worry about it, you know?” Brier says over the phone from New York. “My approach to consuming online content has been to not worry about missing stuff. I trust the network.”

“I think the most important thing [about information online] isn’t any specific piece of content or information, but the architecture and networks, the idea that connections are where the real value is,” Brier says. “It’s connecting two things that don’t necessarily go together or didn’t seem like they went together. That’s the lesson learned from the web.”

Not sure I deserve to be called a master at this, as there are many others I turn to on a daily basis to act as signals. But I guess that’s true for everyone, we all have our sources and they have their sources. It’s turtles all the way down.

April 12, 2011