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I unsubscribe.

Fred Oliveira on October 20, 2005

I finally am back to 0 unread items in my feed reader, after over a month of around 1500 new items a day. How? I unsubscribed from several feeds, and decided to take some hours reading, thinking and taking notes. But the whole process led me to think about something I’ve been meaning to write for a long time - too much information.

The problem with the web has always been the same for now over 10 years - more information than humans can manage. Solutions to this problem have come in what I call ages, and I believe we’ve seen 3 so far and are about to see another. Allow me to specify:

The directory / browse age

Happened from the early web days until let’s say 1995/96. The web had too much information for people to memorize. Even for a very small set of people using only a few pages, it was overhaul. Too many, too long urls that took too much time to write down, type and click. So, the solutions were directories of links, categorizing each page to make them readily available in an easy to manage form. Yahoo! was the most attractive approach to the problem at the time, and others followed.

The search age

From 1996 to 2003. The amount of pages with information increased so much that the directory paradigm wasn’t enough to acomodate all the data - search came along, waiving the need to remember any URLs, or any directory. You type in what you’re looking for and a search engine gives you the relevant resources. Cool.

The subscribe age

Late 2003 to the current date. People don’t want to search: people want content delivered to them - they want to subscribe. Subscribing to pages and information leads people to spend less time actually looking for information, and spend more time reading what they really want to read. Information delivered to your doorstep is the coup du jour.

The future?

For some, the future is here already. We’re seeing too much subscribed information. Again, too much data we can’t handle by ourselves (it seems data keeps running ahead of the human ability to deal with it). For me, the next couple of years will be about finding new solutions to this new problem imposed by the subscription era. We have too much information delivered to us - most of it, we probably don’t even care about.

Solutions need to be put in place that keep us away (again) from information overload. Because data will not stop showing up unless we relinquish control. What the next age will be called, I don’t know - but I definitely want a way to get the information I care about (and only that information), delivered to me automatically. A combination of search, filtering and subscription seems to be the key, but I’m still to see the ideal product emerge from these ingredients.

How do you manage your information? Do you see too much of it? What do you think the solution is to that now?


Comments on this post

L.

I would suggest that the next ages is filtering : cutting out the deadwood, the stuff that is repeated as a meme becomes popular, the stuff we have seen before. The Web 2.0 puff articles….

Gregory Hoyl Jr.

Jeremy Zawodny (http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/) mentioned a new O’rielly book that has a lot to do with finding our way through information overload: Ambient Findability by Peter Morville (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/ambient/). Seems pretty interesting!

Cheers!

Oscar

This is a very important issue. The Web is a great place to find information. I am writting a postgrad dissertation about it from the economics point of view.
Everything is about rational boundaries, because even if we have the time, we can not process all the information we see. Many companies are working now on the concept of “relevance”. In the best of cases, that would pick the good among the rest. But as the amount of information grows another issue raises: credibility. The best answer to that is compare many sources. We know that this newspaper is conservative, or that other do not contrast sources. But we do not know anything about bloggers or new sites. And we do not have the time. I do not have an answer for how to do that.
Should there be independent companies that pick the best sources? Is hand picked info the answer for your and my question?

Jason

In my opinion, the solution will come when more complex social networks mix with the current blogging scene. I shouldn’t have to looking for information, it should come to me - and only the information I care about. Relevance is based upon not only what topics I find interesting, but also how relevant my friends have found it - a trust web of sorts. Stumble Upon meets RSS meets del.icio.us.

Sean O'Hagan

It’s interesting that the directory age is resurfacing in a new incarnation called social bookmarking. Virtual directories are created by tags. I find that I tag and bookmark more sites and articles than I’ll ever see or read. Once we do manage to sufficiently filter information into manageable chunks in the next age, we will still have the problem of how to effectively bookmark it. At any given time, I may be reading 5 or 10 articles online, which sit in open tabs within my browser with my current position highlighted in blue in each. What an incredibly inefficient way to keep track of my readings. In the real world, I can dogear a page, or underline a sentence. I should be able to do the same on the net. Shameless plug: Toward that goal, I’m developing an in-page bookmarking app. I’d like to invite the Web 2.0 group to give it a spin.

Justin Lilly

I did a bit of brainstorming after reading your post and here’s what I came up with.

Directory services were categorized by information out there, just waiting to be found. It was static and sites were submitted.

Search was categorized by information found, just waiting to be wanted. It was static, but the search engine crawled for it.

Subscription is still information that is found, waiting to be wanted. Its dynamic, but you have to use a search engine or friend to find it.

This is what I came up with to fix the problem:

Filering content will have lots of content pushing through. Barriers, however, will exists that they may weed out unwanted portions. You will set these barriers. Content will be tagged by the author and these tags will be the filtering criteria.

To begin, the user would set out a list of terms they like. They would then set a group of people they trust. This would not be trust in the sense of a friend, but moreso as in a source they trust. I, for example, trust TechCrunch, Scoble, and MicroPersuasion. When any of my trusted sources link to someone, the service would then begin scanning these sources for my criteria. The service would present me with a relavent article from the website in question and ask if I would like to also begin crawling this page. Based on my answer, it would either begin doing this, or blacklist the site from crawling.

If I had the technical know-how, I would create this as I think it could be the next step in aggretory development.

James

Simplify [x3]. I think that we do hoard information because it seems to be a valuable commodity. Search that works well has cheapened information to nearly free - costing us only time. I think that maturation as a consumer of the firehose known as the Internet finds us thinking before we engage in keystrokes and mouse clicks. The weaning from the CRT interface [TV/Internet/recorded film] is a process that is difficult. Perhaps a browser with a timer ;)

Ken Hallenius

I think useful tools like RSS/Atom, as a subscribe tool, are best used when supplemented/replaced by search-within-feeds. This ability is built in to Apple’s Safari 2.0 under Tiger, so that one can create a personalized feed that aggregates information from several sites. For info on that, see the article in November 2005 Macworld at http://www.macworld.com/2005/10/features/safarisecrets/index.php under the subhead “Create a personalized clipping service”.

Scott Niesen

Eric Hayes, a co-author of the attention.xml spec, has an interesting post that tackles information overload head on.

“At the simplest level, using an RSS reader that intelligently notices Attention Streams on desktop PCs can get the pruning process started. By intelligently analyzing both obvious and the subtle Attention Streams, articles that are more likely to be of interest can be prioritized and brought the forefront. Less interesting articles can be pruned or stored for browsing when and if time permits.”

Automatically and intelligently utting through information overload is destined to be the next frontier in RSS technology advancement.

Prioritization, filtering, elimination of extraneous information and recommendations will play a huge role in helping us turn the firehose into a refreshing drinking fountain.

You can read the rest of his post here: http://ehayes.typepad.com/ehayes/2005/08/attention_strea.html

amos dettonville

i put the link to my website article on searchfox rss - which is already doing the filtering part (beta i think). they have a nice screencast demo on their site. i signed up - but i am well past overload on rss.

lately, i have been cruising old school - learning as much as i can about directories (tags are a mess IMHO). though gada.be is an interesting twist on tags and search. vivismo’s clusty on topics and search (wonder when someone’s gonna vivismo tags?). you’ve got etamp and a few others making what i’d call drinking wells for rss feeds and search4rss is a hybrid of directory plus!

one innovation, i hear nothing about - but i use it - is eurekster’s search parties. search for “dettonville blog search” to find mine. it’s a community driven search and influenced search (kinda cool).

blogdigger’s groups is that novel communal idea which probably no one will fully catch.

don’t know though, i don’t even want to open that bloglines account and wade through what’s left there. lost the keys to my other online aggs (fine with me). and i’m once bitten a bit shy about digging too much into searchfox rss (but i will because i am a nerd).

so, like most have said, community driven, filtered, delivered, and i’ll add my 2cents - probably niche oriented - and some form of niche directory or community where a person can do everything in that little circle (no wait?!! friendster et al. already did this???!).

still, i think there’ll be comfy little portal like centers popping up all about - with a cast of regulars and good filtered content politely offered (monitered for popularity) and either it will be like usenet of old, where joe or josephine dry-eyes will have their niche driven to them and links to lead them outward bound if they want. or, hmmm, i don’t know. sounds like the net is circling back to the beginning with tons more content and tons more people.

maybe, i’ll just watch :-)

peac4d.
amos dettonville

George Chiramattel

Hi,

I fully agree with you - ‘Too much of information is no information’, unless you have the right tools that can process all this data and present meaningful data.

Let’s take news.com as an example. Instead of presenting a long list of new stories they have added tooling that can help readers make more sense of the information and help then realize the connection between then – In short help users realize ‘The Big Picture’.

So what we need is radically different tooling that can help us handle/visualize the data in radically different way. Following is an article where I describe such a tool, called FolkMind.

http://www.chiramattel.com/george/blog/2005/10/14/folkmind_a_killer_app_for_the_1.html

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Anand Kishore

Hi,

I see the future as every user on the internet as having a profile associated with him ie no anonymity. Information would be automatically delivered to him depending on his net profile ie the websites he visits, the search queries he makes, the blogs etc.

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