I have bumped into Clay Shirky’s presentation: “It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure”. I couldn’t agree more. For the past 2 years I am fantasizing about a magic attention application which will deliver only the information that I want.
Clay’s point is that Information Overload (IO) will get worse. The reasons are clear and simple:
- Exponential growth in Information Producers (IPs) – Everyone has a blog. EVERYONE has a profile on facebook. And it’s getting worse.
- Time to publish (TtP) shortens over time – A couple of years ago you had to be around an internet connection. Then you had to login to your account over an ISDN 56k connection to a bloated CMS in order to publish to the web. Today you can publish from you mobile phone within seconds.
- Free time for publishing (FTfP) – As people already see blogs and other publishing tools as important means for marketing and promotion, as well as keeping in touch, they free more time for those activities.
Now, the equation is simple: IO = IPs * (FTfP / TtP) – this simple math points that IO is skyrocketing.
So, as Clay claims, it is a matter of filters now.
Here is my wish list:
- I want to get only 10 posts per day via my RSS reader. Currently I get over 70, and this is after my RSS diet… I manually filter them to the 10-20 most important of the day.
- I want to get only 30 mails per day (70-100 a day today and counting). I want to get the important ones by importance context so I can focus on the important stuff.
- I want to get the top 10 most important and relevant news headlines for me (I currently read YNET and The Marker from Israel and NYTimes twice a day at least).
- I want to get the most new and interesting 10 links for me each day.
If in the midst of this financial downturn, someone will go for it, I am sure that he will see a huge ROI. I am waiting for the “Semantic Web” but I’m afraid we’ll have to wait at least 4-5 years…
Uzi Shmilovici's Blog 