infoarch

' Information overload is filter failure .' Most of us probably know this quote by Clay Shirky and agree with it. I do. It relates well to what I love about the web. There's information abundance, but the web is structured in such a way that we can pull information towards us that we find interesting. And push away things that are not relevant to us. There are great tools to help you with this.  Feedly is I think my core filtering tool. Twitter would come in second place. (It continues to surprise me how little people use an RSS subscription tool like Feedly...) I hardly ever read something right away though. This is where Pocket come into play. Pocket is where I save interesting online posts and article to read later. But - and this is where I'm interested in your experiences - I find that more and more there is just too much interesting stuff to read. My Pocket is completely stacked with articles I hope to read some day. And this is just the 'digital...

What's the real problem underlying information overload? Nathan Zeldes has been finding answers to this question for years. Recently he wrote a must-read post on the answers he found. There are all kinds of reasons we keep on using email in an unproductive way. But the underlying issue, according to Zeldes, is mistrust . To solve the information overload problem within organizations we need to address this "dark side" of overload. If we don't we'll never structurally solve the problem. Address this dark side and change the underlying culture, Zeldes advises. I agree this is a way to fundamentally root out mistrust. But what if this is not possible? What if the company just doesn't see the problem and therefore does not want to spend time on this extermination process? I think every person can start by settting an example. Be counter-cultural! Show how the way you use email is more effective and productive. It's the long bottom-up approach, but this roa...

I've promised Bill Ives that I'd write a blogpost about Darwin Awareness Engine a long time ago. Finally, here's my post about this new and interesting service. Sorry it took so long... How do you keep up with the news, tweets, updates and feeds? We live in the wonderful world of information abundance. But many feel overwhelmed by the amount and speed of information. Some even talk about information overload. I described how I keep up with what's going on  in the world and in my area's of interest. But can't it be better? Yes, it can. This is where all kinds of new(er) solutions pop up. Like Techmeme and Postrank . There's even talk of Web Squared, Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web , which should help us filter through loads of information coming at us. Not just by highlighting 'the best tweets and feeds', but my semantically analyzing and summarizing the information. The Darwin Awareness Engine fits in this movement. And I think they're do...

Recently I got a DM from @6things saying: "You are very interesting." That's always a great thing to hear. :-) 6things is a relevance engine , as they call themselves. They select 6 things per day in different themes as the most interesting things of that day. Now they are asking others to curate for one week. And probably because they find me interesting, I will be sharing 6 interesting things per day in the coming week with you. I selected the technology theme, so you can following the tweets with #6things_tech . Sharing starts tomorrow, May 23rd. Hope you enjoy it.

Every now and then I run into something that really gets me thinking. Recently I ran into this presentation . ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy In Here? View more presentations from Chris Messina . I went through it several times. And I think I'll do so in the coming days. Really great stuff!! Activity Streams: what are they, how can we collect and understand them? This presentation focuses on public streams, mostly on the internet. But does this story also extend to the streams behind the firewall, inside organization? I think it should, but I'm thinking about how this should work. Of course the firewalls are coming down. But companies will still be protecting their information to a certain extent. My thesis is: These streams will be most useful if the distinction between protected and public information is mixed. What do you think? And how do you think one stream of internal and external information can be devised? I'd love to hear your thoughts. (No...

Last weekend I read an intriguing article in the Dutch newspaper, NRC . A communication researcher, Tjardus van Citters , wanted to give us all well-meaning advice. (Dutch titel: 'Welgemeend advies van een communicatie-expert: minder communicatie, s.v.p', Sept. 20, 2009.) His article gives an overview of the sources that are increasing the number of signals we process each day. For instance the number of communication providers has increased. And the fact that our senses are being addressed more than ever. This overview leads to his advice to communicate less. Why? Because our health is at stake. Our brains get more impulses to process. The model of 'selective perception' is out-dated. We get irritated by communication we did not want to see, leading to restlessness, even illness. He therefore advises us to turn off signals. Read the news once a week instead of every few hours. Unsubscribe to things you don't want to receive. Be clear what kind of emails you ...

Andrew McAfee has another really nice post: 'When Information is NOT the Answer' . I advise you to go and read it, definitely if you are in IT. And for Knowledge and Information Management experts this post summarizes what you've been trying to tell IT all along. McAfee basically shows that not all information can be processed using IT systems. Even though many think so and heavily depend on these systems for decision making. And he gives an example of a company, Zara, that acknowledges this and works with it in practice. In a comment on his post I pointed to two books that underline the point McAfee's making. One is 'Blink' by Gladwell. (And I'll write a review of this book soon.) And the other is 'The Social Life of Information' by Seely Brown & Duguid. (The last book is one of my all time favorites.) If you haven't read them, please do so. It's very worth your time. In 'The social life' they have that nice example of a c...

Alright! Not too long ago I said I would start using Taglocity . And, of course, I promised to tell you more about my experiences using it. Well, here goes! The strange thing is not too many people seem to be using Taglocity. At least not the people in my network. Lots of them use Xobni , as I did too. I tweated my network , searched Twitter , Googled a bit and found their isn't a whole lot of buzz on Taglocity yet. Well I guess I'll have to create some and lead the way... ;-) Ok, now about Taglocity. As I said I really enjoy Gmail functionality. Taglocity brings this to Outlook. And it works for me. I really enjoy adding labels to my email. I still put mail in one of the 6 folders I have (of which the biggest one is 'Deleted items'). But I now also label them. This makes finding my email back much faster. And I don't have to be to anxious to put the email in the right folder. The search speed of Taglocity is good enough. In practice I switch between Outlook ...

Nice presentation (9 min.) by Luis Suarez to whom I've been pointing regularly on my blog. This is his presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin (added in below). It gives a good overview of how he's trying to stop using e-mail for the wrong reasons and what he experiences doing this. I've asked the question before, but I'd really like to hear more from Luis about the time he used to spend on email and the time he now spends on email and the social tools. (Something for the Sweettt podcast , Luis?!) Also relate to his posts on day 1 , day 2 and day 3 of the Expo. Tags van Technorati: email , information overload , web2.0 , enterprise2.0

Ran into this interesting news via Michael Sampson's blog : EMC started a company that will focus on personal information management. I've always wondered why the large enterprise information management vendors never adequately addressed the personal information space. I found they basically said: use the enterprise system, even if it doesn't fit your personal way of working. Will Decho, the new company, truly address this gap? I'm really curious if they will and will follow this step. Also refer to EMC press release and Decho site (which basically tells you Decho now 'only' sells a backup service). Tags van Technorati: knowledge worker , knowledge management , content management , information overload

Well, just ran into Taglocity . I read through their site to see what they offer. I must say it all sounds very interesting. I'm curious how Taglocity compares to Xobni . I've been using Xobni for some time now and am pretty enthusiastic about the tool. Is Taglocity even better? So, I'm de-installing Xobni to try Taglocity. (I don't want 2 sidebars in my Outlook and I'm don't want to try them both at the same time.) One think I'm really curious about is tagging in Outlook like in Gmail. That would be great! (I use Outlook 2003 and heard that 2007 has tagging functionality.) So, I'll be using Taglocity for the coming weeks. I'll let you know what my experiences are. My evaluation questions are: how does Taglocity compare to Xobni in general? is Taglocity as social as Xobni? are the Taglocity tags as good as Gmail's? can tagged emails also be retrieved after they've been archived and/or moved? is Taglocity secure (als...

Often the blogosphere just points you to great posts. Luis Suarez pointed us/me to this great post on email overload on the tfpl blog . It is titled "Breaking the e-mail compulsion" . It passes on some interesting facts about email use and addiction. It goes on to give us some good email tips (which I apply already). But what really triggered me was the big question: The challenge that I would like organisations and vendors to address is this: How do we enable colleagues to generate, send and store an important communication about a project within the same application that holds the rest of the documents, communications and information relating to that project? I can't tell you too much, but colleagues of mine addressed this issue and answered this question to a large extent. I pointed to a paper on this work here . And I hope to publish another paper on this topic with them soon. So, keep in touch! "Context" and keeping information "in context" i...

I was pretty enthusiastic about this new app Feedmysearch and started using it right away. I'm glad I didn't delete my Google Alerts yet. I set up several Feedmysearch feeds on topics as "document management" and "knowledge management". The results are horrible. Google Alerts gives me daily results, which are pretty relevant. Feedmysearch gives me a feed every so often, and the results are really bad (old, limited, etc.). I stopped using Feedmysearch. Back to good old Alerts (and my regular feeds of course). I wonder: Am I the only one experiencing this?

Some time ago I posted on a tool called Context Organizer . I told you I would evaluate the tool and share my experiences with you. A commenter rightly reminded me to do that. So here goes! Actually I evaluated it a long time ago and eventually stopped doing that and even de-installed the tool. I simply had too much issues with the software and plugins. I'll bet there have been a bunch of updates. My evaluation is about the version they had around November-December 2007. Interestingly, the company selling Context Organizer (and other products) found me via LinkedIn. They said they were looking for people with a background in language technology and knowledge management. That was the first time a company approached me via LinkedIn, so I found that quite exciting. After downloading 'Context Organizer' and playing around with it for some time, I emailed them these comments: "Well, I took a look at Context Organizer this evening! In the past I've looked at auto s...

Some time ago I pointed to an interesting ReadWriteWeb article about trends in reading . Now there's an even more intriguing piece on reading behavior. We're reading less and skimming more ! Again, I'm really curious what its implications are for reading/skimming in the enterprise.

Nice post on ReadWriteWeb giving an overview of UI concepts that could help us overcome information overload (with several nice video demo's!). These could also address the integration of paper and digital documents, as I post before , relating to Microsoft Surface.

Joost pointed me to this interesting post on wiki sessions on the Workplace Blog . What are these sessions for? The goal of the meeting was to educate peers about wikis and then talk specifically about the Avenue A | Razorfish wiki. This is interesting and it triggered me. Wouldn't it be nice to set up " productivity sessions" in companies? (Or do you already have them? Please share your!) In these sessions employees can share their ways of working, their way to be productive. For instance, how do you organize your email, your paper, your blog posts, etc.? At the company I work for we have done this by setting up a workshop on coping with information overload. But this was a one-time-thing.

There’s (been) a lot of buzz about new Semantic Web and natural language tools the last couple of months (sometimes called 'web 3.0' ...). News about Radar Network’s Twine , Metaweb’s Freebase , TrueKnowledge and Powerset . (I got my invite to Powerset the other day!) This is very interesting. And I’m really curious whether these new apps will take us further than all the Semantic Web and natural language processing promises that were made in the nineties. Then semantic search was promoted and question answering, automatic summarization, etc. Semantic Web, language and speech technology was also hyped by companies like Lernout and Hauspie . After L&H came crashing down it seemed that natural language and speech technology turned quiet, was licking it’s wounds and looking for new approaches. With this in mind I was surprised by the fact that there are several companies attempting to address this market again. And practically at the same time. I’m always curious how ...

Ruud Janssen ( Telematica Instituut ): Coping with information overload Information overload is a popular subject. And for good reasons. Lots of media comes at use via lots of different ways. However we can only process a certain amount of information at a certain speed in a certain amount of time. This can stress people, which, in short, we call ‘information overload’. Refer to NRC article, Nov. 8, 2007: "Inbox overflow leads to less colleague contact" . Following interviews and workshops, e-mail is usually seen as the culprit (ambiguous e-mails, e-mail avalanches, number of e-mails, etc.). They also found that some managers suffer more from information overload than others. This seems to result from the way they handle information overload. In other words: the way one handles information overload relates to how much you suffer from it. Furthermore information overload is not always experienced, but in periods of time. They focused on information overloa...

In my newspaper the NRC I read an interesting article about our always overflowing inbox’s and its implications for our contacts with colleagues. Douwe Egbert coffee systems saw that less and less colleagues meet at the coffee corner for a talk and a cup of coffee. Contact with colleagues, even if their just around the corner, is often done by email. So, they asked a bureau to investigate this. They found that more than 50% of Dutch employees says that personal contact has decreased because of email. They would like to be able to talk (live) with their colleagues. For this reason companies, such as U.S. Cellular, Deloitte and Intel have a ‘no e-mail Friday’. This does not seem to be a structural solution, others say, because now everyone sending more e-mail on Monday to Thursday. Anyway it’s a good signal to the employees. Others say there should be an e-mail code of conduct. (Within R&D 20 colleagues defined such a code of conduct in a workshop some time ago.) What do yo...