Comments on: Tech giants tackle information overload

Nonprofit Information Overload Research Group--whose members include Microsoft Research, IBM, and Google employees--holds its first conference this week in New York.

[medtondo]

Getting on my soapbox.....

What ever happened to time management? Twitter, Facebook, etc should be done at home or on an official break. Email - close it when you need to think and turn it on when you are between tasks. The world is not going to explode if you don't check your email every 43 seconds.

I was an info addict. Once I did not get email for 2 hours and I called our email support staff, and they told me the system was fine and who was I to think I was important enough to get email ALL THE TIME - it really hit home so I went on an info diet. Twitter, Facebook, GreenNexxus, etc when I am home, I turn off my email when working on RFP's, quotes, reports, etc and I turn off the Blackberry (now an iPhone) when I am eating. I know these are not drastic measures but life has been a little calmer and I get much more done and I even have a conversation over diner.

Off my soapbox.....

Thanks for listening

[Imalittleteapot]

Now that's funny.

[private-internet]

Much of the information is noise - not important. The future and the innovation is to sort out what is important to you personally .. look at it from the perspective of the Internet as your private library - you keep what is important to you ..

[patrickcameron]

We at Filtrbox saw information overload as an opportunity to make things better for knowledge workers. The promise of the internet and digital communication is that it allows us to increase our productivity by further enabling access to global information. The challenge of the internet is that this channel of communication has become so cluttered that it makes it difficult to cull the productivity increasing knowledge from the noise.

To deal with this challenge we created a web based offering that proactively monitors mainstream news, blogs and social media to deliver the relevant knowledge that information professionals need. The service is FREE for up to 5 persistent searches. Please give us a try at filtrbox.com.

[bdboyce]

Yes, a very big problem. Lets look at just 2 things...
NEWS - I think we must have more reporters than we have news. You can see different versions of the same story for days. People who don't think things through will believe that the repetition is verification that thatt news items is both true and even insightful. You gotta think about these things.
MANAGEMENT - One of the real tricks in mgmt is filtering out what you don't need to know. Leave what can be done by subordinates to them. Its very hard to teach young managers how this works.