In preparation for the launch of this website, I did a lot of pruning and cleaning of the various social network sites of which I am a member. As you would expect, the more involved in any particular social network, the more connections I made. Inevitably, responding to the amount of communication within my networks has started to become an enormous time suck.

This is obviously not an uncommon problem. Lifehacker pointed me in the direction of Steve Rubel’s use of Gmail to consolidate his social networking communications.

What he doesn’t mention is how he deals with e-mail clutter.

In 2001, maleszyk.com began as a personal blog that chronicled my life as a single guy working to make a better internets. I talked about the women I dated, the movies I saw, the music I listened to, and what I had for dinner.

What I didn’t talk about, at least not at length, was what is commonly termed in our society as my “work.” Not because I didn’t enjoy it, but because I didn’t feel I was engaged enough to have anything worthwhile to say on a regular basis.

Over the last few years as a consultant in user experience design, I’ve been quietly but intently watching, listening, and thinking about the dramatic ways in which what I have been doing for a living for the past 11 years has been dramatically changing the world that we live in. The rise the move toward miscellaneous, the power of the long tail, and the increasing focus on findability in an information economy has changed the way we date, watch movies, listen to music, or decide what to have for dinner.

And here I am, standing in the middle of all of it, a member of the information cognoscenti. I hope to contribute my wisdom, if just a small part, to the crowd.