Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users blog is always great reading, particularly if you're interested in how people take in information. Though it has a definite tilt towards the world of Java development, most of the articles speak in general terms about learning and design -- you won't see any code here.

Kathy's recent article The myth of "keeping up" really hit home with me. Loosely speaking, my day job is to monitor the entire realm of web technology. Realistically, this is one of those areas that is bigger than one person's brain. Even if I spent 24 hours a day reading about the latest web technology (let alone reporting on it), I wouldn't be able to keep up.

So... it's time to let that go. You're not keeping up. I'm not keeping up. And neither is anyone else. At least not in everything. Sure, you'll find the guy who is absolutely cutting-edge up to date on some technology, software upgrade, language beta, whatever. But when you start feeling inferior about it, just think to yourself, "Yeah, but I bet he thinks Weezer is still a cool new band..."

I never liked Weezer anyway.

Kathy offers plenty of good advice for being selective and efficient about what you choose to stay on top of. She mentions jumping on aggregators, tools that collect information from many sources and distill it down into an efficient view.

My aggregator of choice is BlogBridge (I even contribute code to the project, which is open source and cross platform), which has a whole range of subtle but indispensable tools that allow me to filter my information intake according to the amount of time I have available on any given day.

Another item of advice that Kathy offers is to track down an expert in any field you want to learn and get a breakdown what things you absolutely must learn, what things you probably should learn, what things would be nice to learn, and what things you can ignore.

Kathy goes on to suggest that technical publishers like SitePoint (where I work) should be thinking about these issues too, rather than just pumping out bricks of undigestable knowledge.

There's an opportunity for all of us to help our users (or start a business around helping people reduce the info overload/pressure-to-keep-up stress most of us feel).

I personally think SitePoint is doing a pretty decent job of this already, but there is always room for improvement.