Information overload? Go human!
Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research is complaining that email is consuming him. In all fairness he also states that he himself is the likely culprit by getting caught up in status updates, mails from collaboration tools etc., ie system generated mails.
Jeremiah asks what can be done, and he’s not alone. Every single day people complain about information overload. And yet they keep on adding to the information pile.
I have an idea about how to solve it: Go human!
What do I mean about that? Well for starters let me say that I think Microsofts CEO, Steve Ballmer, nailed it 100 %, when during a fireside chat with Guy Kawasaki at this years Mix conference he said that humans are not abusive when it comes to email. Notification services are abusive, spammers are abusive, distribution lists are abusive etc. But not humans.
So what should you do? First of all you should unsubscribe from unimportant distribution lists and notification services. Because lets face it: It’s more noise than signal anyway.
More importantly there are huge opportunities for companies and media to make information services human and stop the advance of the machines.
I mean, why should I subscribe to a breaking news service, if for instance I could subscribe to my favourite anchor persons or celebs news feed? If there’s someone I identify with and trust for my news, subscribing to his or her feed would give me the news, I need. It would be more relevant. And I have a feeling that the signal to noise ratio would change dramatically for the better. Heck, I might even want to pay for such a service.
On top of all this making things human have the added bonus of being harder to copy for others. In other words having the right people on board and having them exclusively becomes a competitive factor once again. And that in itself may provide huge opportunity for doing business.
1 comment
The fact that more information is incessantly created gives us an opportunity to invent better methods to mine the information and create catalogs of metadata.
Personally to effectively cope with the incoming streams of information I’m using my summarization application. At a click of a button I get to see the essential keywords and the most important sentences. Over period of time I found that looking at the instant information capsules gives me quite useful insight and saves me a lot of time. If you would like to try out summarization this is the product link: Context Organizer from Context Discovery Inc.
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