I'm open to any suggestions on how to handle this information overload.
It may seem like the industry is screaming along but its mainly media hype. The important things will take a few years to get where they need to be, I dare you to pick any ground breaking technology and I'd bet if you missed 6 months it wouldn't hurt you one bit. You'd see a few flash in the pan success stories, but mainly things just chug along.
And thats the key to information overload, understanding you can just stop for a few days, a week, what ever, it won't matter. Remove the addictive nature of it. Make sure its a pleasure and not a chore.
For myself I've moved from blogs to aggregators now to get the best articles. I don't need all the articles, just the best. I could go several places for that (reddit, digg, slashdot). But I come to hacker news most, primarily because the conversation threads are of a higher standard. I can learn x10 more from a thread than I can an article.
I've also found curated aggregators on my iPad extremely useful, I'm talking to Zite, Flip Board, Feedly etc... theres something casual and relaxing about them. I recommend getting a tablet, I've never used an android one but I assume its just as good as my iPad.
There is an insane amount of news getting generated - but most of it is just noise. The trick that I follow is to pick a few areas that I am really interested in and find good sources/websites where the signal to noise ratio is low. Even good blogs don't produce useful articles all the time.
Another thing that I do is - every morning I quickly scan and stash off articles I want to read, and then I read them up properly later in the day. Trying to read everything will just not allow you to get any productive work done!
Even if you spend a week at Tahoe lake. You can follow up here(check RSS feeds). http://cuotcher.com/topic/Venture_capital
Information source is an aggregation of our private alpha testers' twitter streams, and only filtered interesting articles are notified. Let me know if you are interested.