And I’m not the only one that E-RSS has been overreaching. I had an interesting conversation with one of the junior partners of the lead VC firm on the issue (keep in mind, he was a respected enterprise architect at one point in his career). He observed that administrating feeds, enhanced security, providing a new channel for notifications, etc… were all valid value propositions of E-RSS. But his take on the whole issues of solving information overload through heuristics, and Enterprise Attention Management, etc… was that it a great promise on the surface, but would be realized any time soon.

Also… there’s a trend afoot to simply “unplug.” As famed weblogger Robert Scoble recently asked, “What are your goals? Is it to have more followers on Twitter? Or is it to get something done today?” One commenter to Scoble’s post (entitled “Not productive enough? Turn off the Internet” called the phenomenon “attention thieves.”

Hat tip to Paul Chaney for noting the trend in his post “Social media pied-pipers disconnecting from the net.” He also notes that Doc Searls is giving up on blogging and Hugh McLeod is deleting his twitter account.

To be clear, I still believe that E-RSS and social media have a valid and quantifiable value proposition… but we need to get real about solving the problem of information overload. To overreach in such a nascent arena is to hurt something that we’re all vested in.

And finally, not to get to far afield, but I think we’re also unintentionally diverting attention away from something that holds great strategic business value: mapping the hidden networks of tacit knowledge workers. It’s equally as sexy - from a business value standpoint and can be quickly codified through the repurposing of existing analytics/reporting packages.