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Ideas and trends to tackle information overload

New Service “Filtrbox” to tackle Information OverloadMay 17

Yesterday I stumbled upon the interesting new service Filtrbox which also aims to help users to deal with information overload in a better way.

If you are using Google News Alerts, you know that you can make google send you only news articles that contain certain keywords, and also exclude articles using a minus in front of the keyword.

Filtrbox basically does the same, however with some nice enhancements:

• Suggestion of keywords: after an initial keyword has been entered, filtrbox displays a cloud of additional tags that might be interesting to add/ exclude in your filtr
• More user friendly interface: users can drag & drop suggested keywords to include or exclude them
• Preview: you can watch what your filtr retrieves in real-time, making optimizing your filtr easy

Beyond that, you can als

Getting Smarter Without Doing AnythingMay 5

Is this a joke? Surprisingly, it’s not.

At first thought it seems to be an unbreakable rule that in order to expand our knowledge, we need to take in (”consume”) new information. Unfortunately, finding relevant information and consuming it takes time and effort - especially in today’s world of information overload this can be quite tedious.

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we did not have to consume any information and still expand our knowledge as shown in the following picture, therefore sidestepping information overload?

Believe it or not, but there is a way to achieve this. The secret lies in reliable alert services that only inform you if a specific happening has occurred, therefore also telling you something if they keep quiet (so that you know nothing has happened).

One example: you subscribe to an alert service that notifies you if a US tennis player wins a tournament on the ATP tour. If you haven’t received an alert for the last two months and somebody asks you about it, you could tell him that in the last 2 months no US player has won a tournament - without actively following the tennis results.

In other words, you have increased your knowledge over time without having had to

Why Digg works. And Where it Fails.March 29

Kevin Rose started out with a mere $200 funding. Within 18 months, his internet application Digg has become one of the most visited technology media sites and made it into the top 1,000 sites on the net. As a result, estimation of Digg’s current market value go high, reaching $300 milllion and more.

The reason for Digg’s amazing success seems to be obvious: Digg provides a platform for users to vote on articles, these votes then serve as a guideline for other users to identify the needles (good articles) in the haystack, therefore helping to deal with information overload in a better way.

As Techcrunch points out, this is not only Digg’s secret: many successful Web 2.0 services aim to make it easier for people to deal with the mountain of information they are facing every day. And due to the scope of the information overload problem (in my opinion one of the biggest of all, check out The real costs of information overload and

Information Overload: The Silent BurdenMarch 7

Information Overload is an interesting phenomenon. Everybody knows it’s a major obstacle to productivity but if you ask people you’ll find out that not many are thinking on how they can deal with it in a systematic way.

For instance, do you agree that information overload has a negative impact on your day? And: when have you last taken some time to consciously think how you can deal with it more effectively? I am not talking about quick fix solutions like simply cutting back on information consumption (which is often the subconscious solution), but really spending some time to come up with solutions that reduce the negative impact from information overload without running the risk of missing out on the important news.

For many their honest answer to these two questions implies a certain paradox. It might be a bold statement, but information overload may be a problem with one of the highest “negative impact” to “what is done about it”-ratios.

I’ve been thinking why this is the case and came to the conclusion that it’s mainly due to two factors: one is the incremental costs of IO, causing people to underestimate them, and the other is that information overload’s costs are not very well visible.

The incremental costs of IO can be demonstrated best if we try to quantify them. For instance Basex, a US research firm,

Comment on Information Overload debate hosted by The EconomistMarch 3

For those of you who are interested, here is my comment on the information overload debate hosted by The Economist and CA (Computer Associates) as mentioned in the previous post:  

Technology’s aim never was to simplify our lives. It’s idea is to improve our lives. Simplicity is certainly correlated with the latter goal, but it is not the same. The proposition’s statement (“…if the promise of technology is to simplify our lives, it is failing”) is therefore based on a wrong assumption.

However, it does point to something that many people complain about: technology is often stated as the culprit of information overload causing lost productivity, diminished quality of thought, increased level of stress and so on.

But also this statement is not correct. It’s not the technology itself, but the higher expectations that are set by our line managers, our friends, and ourselves. We could simply stop using technology to get information (it’s optional after all) but we would fall behind in comparison to what our colleagues or friends know.

Therefore you could say that technology is indirectly responsible because it enabled the development to our society where we are expected to be on top of the news. However