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 road empowers you, instead of waiting and complaining until "the rest of the company" gets it and starts the "improve trust program".
Showing posts with label information overload. Show all posts
Showing posts with label information overload. Show all posts
Helping You Filter Streams - Darwin Awareness Engine
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 doing a good job. I can see why they won several prizes. It works and it's useful.
Bill Ives explains what Darwin Engine is about and what it does here.
Rather than using semantic technology to attempt to enable understanding by a computer, our approach to awareness based on Chaos Theory provides a visualization of results that better enables a person to make more informed decisions about where to look next. Then there are tools that allow for efficient drilling down into relevant details. It builds on a person’s expertise rather than trying to replace it.You can try it here or built on Twitter here. You'll see it presents the information in tagcloud-like visualizations. It also shows a ticker-tape. By adding and removing terms (attractors) the results can be manipulated.
I used Darwin Engine for some time. I don't use it very often anymore. My experiences are:
- Darwin Engine or Twortex was an extra space for me to watch (besides the streams that I already pay attention to). It was too much for me to also keep going there. I also wonder if this has to do with usability. Are the visualizations visual enough and is the interface self-explanatory enough for users to keep coming back? The biggest challenge for a new service is to get users to integrate it in their workflow.
- I liked the application of the Engine to Twitter, called Twortex. It would be great to flip the standard Twitter timeline with a more visual one like Twortex. Not only on terms but also on my or one of my follower's timeline. I do find Twortex kind of slow. Sometimes is keeps on processing without showing results.
- Related to the previous bullet: I think it would be helpful to have a more visual navigation of my feeds in Google Reader. I'd like to see the traditional feedlist and easily flip to the visual mode. Flipboard and Zite show there a market for more visual navigation.
- As mentioned on the website, Darwin Engine is great for business and competitive intelligence work. And for information management departments. It would be neat to use the Engine on internal company information as well.
Have you used Darwin Engine? What are your experiences? Please share your comments or blogposts here.
Sharing 6Things
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.
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.
External and Internal Activity Streams
Every now and then I run into something that really gets me thinking. Recently I ran into this presentation.
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.
(Note: Thx Tom (@tvgtvg) for the discussion that led to this post!)
Too Much Communication
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 don't want to get. Read from paper instead of screen (- you can concentrate on paper better than with reading from a screen, he says). And remember: the interest/importance of the message is defined by the sender.
Wow. This is really different from the trend that says we we moving to 'life streaming', 'filtering' and the 'real-time web'. I don't feel I'm becoming sick, irritated, etc. by the amount of information and communication signals I'm processing. Of course I do find we should think before we communicate and share. It should be mindful.
But I feel like I'm missing something here. Are you experiencing what is described in this post? And where can I read more about this subject, also proving the statement that more communication is unhealthy?
Re: When Information is Not the Answer
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 control tower. The tower is fused with IT. But when they really tried to understand the PEOPLE that work in the tower and how they make decisions, they arrived at interesting results. These people used sticky notes, easily processed loads of data, make decisions based on intuition and experience - not on what's on the screen, etc.
And 'Blink' is loaded with examples of 'split-second decisions'. He shows that these decision can be good when they're (implicitly) based on processing lots of information in the past and becoming expert at something. Gladwell shows that some can make good decisions even though all the (objective/general) information in the world seems to be against them.
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First Taglocity Experiences
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 search, Taglocity search and MS Desktop Search. Just depends on what nearest. What I really like about Taglocity search is the fact that it searches all my Outlook folders and archives. When you move emails to your archive it reindexes pretty quickly. The start-up time of the Taglocity search client could be quicker though. Furthermore, when I query I would expect it to search in my tags first, but default is full-text search. Filtering your search results using the labels works wonderfully. (As in most search tools, give Taglocity some time to index your mails when you start using the plugin!)
Adding tags to your emails is very easy. No explanation needed here. You can even add a tag to the email you are going to send (- this is not that easy in Gmail). It would be nice to have colored tags as Gmail has. You can also add tags to people, but I don't use it. In the search client, the tags are not in alphabetical order, for some reason.
I don't use the 'conversation viewer' often but it works and is great. (Of course you can turn on the conversation view in Outlook too, but Taglocity's feature let's you switch between the views with one mouse click. It's not or-or, but and-and.)
Relating to Xobni, Taglocity also has social network features. You get some stats saying how many emails you sent, received and cc-ed to the person. This is nice, but I don't really use it. It would be nice to have the Xobni 'schedule meeting' functionality in Taglocity.
Does Taglocity slow down Outlook? This is a very important question to me. If the plugin would slow things down, I'd quit using it right away. Up until now I don't think Taglocity slows down my computer and/or Outlook - other stuff is doing that...
Oh, and if you wondered: I'm not going back to Xobni.
Tags van Technorati: email,information overload,information management,knowledge management,paperless
Stop Using E-mail
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.
EMC also Focusing on Personal Information
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).
Trying Taglocity: tagging Outlook
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 (also the free version)?
- what could the implications of Taglocity be for corporate email? (Relating to what Taglocity claims.) Could this be a big step towards RSS-ifying email and less email, as Luis Suarez is working on?
If you're trying Taglocity too, please let me know and share your experience with me/us.
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