Marshall Kirkpatrick on source selection, connecting ideas, diverse thinking, and enabling serendipity

“I find it much more useful to pick a certain collection of trusted sources that have a demonstrated history of adding value around a given topic and subscribing to those.”

– Marshall Kirkpatrick

About Marshall Kirkpatrick

Marshall Kirkpatrick was the first writer hired by TechCrunch and helped drive its early growth through the quality of his work, then moved to become Co-Editor of ReadWriteWeb, then one of the defining publications on the Internet economy. He left to found Little Bird, which uses network analysis to discover top influencers, experts, and insights. Little Bird was acquired in 2016. Marshall continues his work to improve the information ecosystem and develop better information systems.

Website: Marshall Kirkpatrick

LinkedIn: Marshall Kirkpatrick

Twitter: Marshall Kirkpatrick

Facebook: Marshall Kirkpatrick

Instagram: Marshall Kirkpatrick

What you will learn

• Why source selection is essential in working with information (02:02)
• Why source size depends on the topic (04:01)
• Marshall’s guide to advanced Twitter search (09:31)
• How to maximise the benefits of a news aggregator (12:30)
• How to create a news article when you find a subject with high engagement (17:11)
• How to store and catalogue content you want to consume (20:12)
• Marshall’s method for connecting which he calls Triangle Thinking (26:41)
• How to read a book for maximum synthesis (30:15)
• How to create and use STEEP analysis (32:10)
• Why it is increasingly important to search for and listen to people on the margins of political power (38:38)

Episode Resources

• Anki Flashcard App
• Symphonic Thinking
• Doc Searls
• Steve Gillmor
• Walt Whitman
• ReadWriteWeb
• Richard MacManus
• PostRank
• Delicious
• Magpie RSS
• Feedly
• Techmeme
• Memeorandum
• Metaweb
• Pocket
• If This Then That (IFTT)
• Bruce McTague
• Roam App
• April Dunford
• Tom Cheesewright
• Daniel Pink
• How To Read A Book by Mortimer Adler
• HyperWrite
• STEEP Analysis
• Incasting
• John Hagel
• Damon Centola
• McKinsey
• Gartner
• Deloitte
• Forrester
• Accenture

Transcript

Ross Dawson: Marshall, it’s wonderful to have you on the show.

Marshall Kirkpatrick: Ross, thank you so much for having me on the show. What a great opportunity for you and me to meet, and to compare notes. I can’t wait to listen to all the episodes.

Ross: They are coming soon. Marshall, you have always thrived on information as a journalist, at one point as a tech journalist, so you got to keep on top of stuff there. You’ve built a very interesting startup. A lot of other guys you’ve been across, and all sorts of change. What’s the essence of that? How do you do that?

Marshall: The essence of it, I believe, is that I focus on a few fundamental steps. The first is source selection. I am careful and deliberate about building out a library of sources on a topic that I want to follow. Then I set up an interface for myself, that makes it easy for me to capture both, the most important pieces of information coming from those sources and a serendipitous mix of other information coming from those sources. Then finally, I try to process the information that I get through tools like spaced repetition flashcards, and linked notes taking, a database, paper and pen, symphonic thinking, and drawing of connections between various things that I’ve read over the years. That combination of source selection, interface creation, and post-processing for synthesis has been the fundamental story of how I have worked with information over the years.

Ross: Yes, a lot more people should learn to do it like you, I’d say.

Marshall: Thanks. I hope that this show can help. I want to share some of the practices that I have developed through trial and error over the years. I’d like to tell people about those practices, tools, and strategies, so that some of them may be useful to some people, and/or they may just make people feel freer to experiment themselves, and come up with methods that work well for them.

Ross: Okay, let’s dig into it. So source selection, is this explicit? Do you have a certain number of sources that you’re around? How many sources are there? And how does that evolve? How do you develop that list and evolve it?

Marshall: It really depends on the topic. I’d say that the most important step for me in source selection was just deciding to focus on that. I was inspired in large part by something that Doc Searls said, almost 20 years ago, when talking about using an RSS reader, and I believe, Doc Searls and Steve Gillmor were discussing keyword search versus source subscription, and Doc said, If I listened to everything that was published, that contained certain keywords that were of interest to me, it would just be really noisy, a very mixed quality. He said I find it to be much more useful to pick a certain collection of trusted sources that have a demonstrated history of adding value around a given topic and subscribing to those.
Now Steve took a different perspective. Steve Gillmor back in the day was so set on the serendipity that he refused to even share links to things with people, he’d say, go Google for it, go find it yourself because he knew that as you searched around for something, you were liable to come across all kinds of other magical unforeseen insights, as you finally made your way to your destination. I do think that that combination is really delightful but I think that the source selection reminds me of something that I read, Walt Whitman once said about writing poetry in iambic pentameter; he said, there is a special beauty to creating art within constraints; so having a finite set of sources I monitor, it might be 10 people. If I’m building a custom search engine, for example, to search in the archival content of an organization, these days, I limit that to 10 sources, largely because Google Custom Search now limits to only 10 sources that it’ll index, but that’s fine. There are ways to work around that.
I usually don’t bother, because 10 canonical sources on a topic are great. But when I was covering various industries, as a journalist, or various sectors of the industry, I would go out and build a collection of 300 sources on, say, big data, or geolocation, or mobile, whatever the trend was. When I am watching climate change, for example, I’ve got a collection of 1000 people and organizations who are specialists in climate, that I monitor. Different topics and different circumstances warrant different sizes of the source list.

Ross: So your sources are individuals more than media entities?

Marshall: Not necessarily, no. I really like a mix of both. I’d say that there’s a different flavor to the sources that you get. Say in a Twitter list, you’ll get a good mix, but perhaps a preponderance of individuals. There’s a certain tone to the conversation, there are lots of replies. It’s easy to sort tweets by engagement. I can say, for example, search inside this Twitter list of 1000, climate experts, individuals, and organizations, but largely individuals for anything containing the words indigenous land rights, that has more than 20 favorites, and sort by recency, and I can find that content, then click and open those tweets and see the dialogue that has occurred around them in replies. That is one flavor of research.
But if I am using an RS