Monday, April 18, 2005

Information overload: volume or change

While there has been a dramatic increase in information volume the actual problem for me is the rate of information change. Or maybe I am unable to manage the fundamentals of the information flow, how do pick out the key pieces of information and relate back to my existing knowledge framework.

When the information sources and formats change so rapidly we are unable to categorize them before we move onto the next piece. The whole idea of refereed technical papers was to try and place the information in a broader context and relate it to other similar information. Today's hyperlinks may be technically better but the information schema is not well designed so they do not perform the necessary context creation, or at best it is ad hoc.

Of course Blogs (like this one) add to the problem as we publish more a stream of consciousness (speaking only for myself) rather than a well consider view with information to back it up. Blogs are thoughts in progress and do contain many nuggets but they needed to be forged into coherent thoughts and placed in a larger context.

Is the next great Google type company not something that finds the atoms but something that creates the contextual fabric of knowledge?

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