Listening to Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson The Holtz and Hobson Report it occurred to me how many different worlds co-exist alongside each other and yet never really interact.

Shel and Neville's podcast is devoted to blogging and the space where 'communication and technology meet'. They got me thinking about two big issues.

First, information overload:  One of the subjects they are talking about is badly targeted PR spam - and as we are all continuously exposed to an almost infinite flux of information it's a relevant discussion even for those of us who don't receive PR spam specifically. I think the general view (including a really interesting intervention from Dan York) was that originators should do a little more research about the intended recipient before pushing the send button.

I have a different view, which is that there is so much stuff out there that the onus is on the individual to pick and choose what they want to 'consume'. This what we do when we pick a TV programme or read a newspaper, we go for what is relevant and interesting to us in our media choices. The concept of the self segmenting audience builds on the idea that people 'pull' information to them from a broad flow - is there a better way of ensuring relevance? Hold that thought.......

The second idea is more indirect. Whenever I listen or talk to guys like Shel or Neville I always have the feeling that I'm eavesdropping on a conversation that is going on in a different world. It's really interesting and I wish I knew more so that I could join in, but they are so far down the road in their field that I really don't think I could say anything they haven't heard before.

What really strikes me here is that almost every conversation I listen to has this unique specialist component. It could be the gardners in my local pub talking about the secret of their shallots, or the football fans who can reference every result of every game their team has ever played, or my kids discussing the geneaology of their favourite band (whose name I've never heard). It is humbling in one way, but at the same time the idea that there is so much to learn out there is really exciting.

Like everybody else, I listen to people I know. If a friend recommends something to me I'm much more likely to go for that option than in response to a random advertising hit. It's word of mouth, of course, and older than the hills and its interesting to know that the online community is developing tools which perform the same function in virtual space. But it is still a closed system. And I remain a self-selecting audience of one, (or is that selection simply a function of identity)?

In this context, I still can't know, or even seek to discover, what I don't know exists in the first place. So I am effectively stuck with a self limiting 'golden' thread of interests. It is a remarkable challenge to access other world views in anything but the most superficial way. But as we are all so deeply interconnected and interdependent, through economics and technology, it is a challenge we have to face.