Using the web today or too much data for the given time

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The pace of the world today seems to be on the fast forward button. The information we get and process daily exceeds what we actually remember and as such we constantly read information selectively, only the ones that are important to us, others we quickly put in the back of our minds and dump maybe just for a later reference or discard all together as we do not think it will be useful for us.

The news we used to read in the newspapers at breakfast has already shifted to reading the latest blogs and news sites on your laptop while drinking coffee. That is just the first morning input, to see the world happenings in our field and around us while we have been asleep.

When we get to work, we usually open our Twitter and other Social media networks and see what our peers shared with us. Usually we get a lot of same articles recommended to read. Well if I am already reading TechCrunch or ReadWriteWeb it can be assumed I am on top of the web tech scene. But even though I read it daily, that does not mean my friends do and sometimes there is an article really worth spreading around and it pops out on every little blog or network you can imagine.

That article can be remixed with different titles, opinions and links through the url shorteners, so you never actually know if it is the same. You go and click on it, but then you see you already read it, probably like 3 times. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could filter all the mentions of the article in just one mention. Going from having 5 retweets, 3 blog posts about the topic and possibly 2 email forwards, to just having 1 mention which combines all the other 10 streams. Filtering unneeded data and condensing the info for you and as such saving you time.

Currently we use RSS feeds, Google Reader and all sorts of channels to gather what we want. We try to organize it into categories, folders, but all that does not filter the actual data, but just rearranges it into boxes that we process at some time. Depending on our habits, we read different articles in the morning or during work and it changes also on the day it is.

So the true question is how to shift our attention from categorizing and parsing all the news ourself to letting the computer do that for us, learning from the connections between the news we read what our friends give us through the social networks and combine the nodes into a “growing” environment of smart information targeted at us, but also still giving us the discovery part of new things as we do not want to be trapped in the box.

Tell us your opinion on how far are we from lowering our information overload?

The preona team would also like to wish you a Merry Christmas with best wishes and some nice quality time with your families over the holidays.

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This entry was written by Peter Čuhalev, posted on December 24, 2009 at 2:37 pm, filed under Information overload and tagged Google Reader, Information overload, newspapers, RSS, Social network, synaptic web. Bookmark the permalink.
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