One of the approaches to reduce information overload are “alert services”, i.e. news services which only send very specific information to its subscribers, and only when it is required.

We’re currently working on a new website for those alert services. In order to find out which alert services we should offer, we’ve launched a survey (results will be published in due course). Please help us fill it out! Only takes 5-10 mins. Participants will be first to know when the new website is launched.

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Can you imagine a world where we only received the information that is relevant to us? A world without time-consuming screening, where we only got the news - and all of the news - that we really care about?

Why don’t we have this world today?

The easiest answer is that the current filtering techniques aren’t advanced enough, and more work needs to be done to improve them. However, in this article I would like to argue that we should not only try to fix the receiving end, but the sending one as well.

Today, no matter what “information stream” we subscribe to; be it newsletters, RSS Feeds, newspapers, TV etc., most of the time we will also receive a lot of irrelevant information. Just think about the newsletters or RSS Feeds to which you currently subscribe. While they do contain interesting information from time to time, they also contain a lot of information you don’t need to know, correct?

The reason for this is, I believe, a structural one. For all “streams” today, once the connection between sender and receiver is established (e.g. subscription to a newsletter) the sender can send us as much information as he or she wants, until we cannot stand it any longer and unsubscribe (or switch channels). There is no direct “control” over the sender to only send the important information, beyond the “threat” that his or her subscribers may jump overboard.

What may initially sound as a benefit to senders actually turns out to be a disadvantage for them as well, because the subscribers are increasingly reluctant to subscribe due to the fear of information overload and senders don’t get as many people to subscribe as they could.

For example: Let’s say you come across a preview site of a new Web 2.0 service that offers to inform you when the service has been launched. How should the webmaster of the site offer to inform you? The most common methods are email alerts/newsletters and RSS Feeds. However, they each have disadvantages from a subscribers’ perspective, leading to fewer subscriptions:  

The idea put forward in this article is to introduce “limited sending rights” for senders, whereby the sender defines a maximum number of messages he can send. That way subscribers know that the sender will not “use up” his sending rights for sending irrelevant information.

For instance, in the above example the webmaster could setup a feed (let’s call it “Private Feed”) on a neutral platform that allows only one message to get sent in total (with a message like “Site has now launched!”), after which the Feed gets automatically deleted.This solution has several advantages from a subscriber’s perspective:  
There is an incentive for the sender, as well, he’ll retain more of his subscribers if they are only getting the information they want. More subscribers means a larger informed market, which is usually the sender’s main goal. Basically, it’s a tool for the “good” senders to demonstrate convincingly that they will only send what they promise to.

The case above was only an example. Limitation of sending rights can be useful every time the sender can make a rough estimate on how many messages will need to be sent. For example, to most people the following Private Feeds would add value, without risking information overload:

• An alert if a favourite singer/ comedian/ band etc. publishes new touring dates (max. 4 messages/ year)
• An alert if a favourite author publishes a new book (max. 4 messages/ year)
• A message to inform that a lottery is accepting new applications, e.g. US Greencard lottery, Worldcup football tickets etc. (max. 2 messages/ year)
• An alert that the sports club/ fitness studio etc. is closed this week (max. 1 message/ week)
• A short reminder for daylight savings time (max. 2 messages/ year)
• Joke of the week (max. 1 message/ week)
• A reminder for valentines day (max. 1 message/ year)
• A reminder for April 1st fools day (max. 1 message/ year)
• A reminder for full moon (max. 13 messages/ year)
• Etc.

The vision is that as users browse the net, they constantly subscribe to a wide range of limited “Private Feeds” (with one click) without any inhibitions, thereby ensuring that they will not miss out on any important stuff and without risking spam or information overload.

This, in a nutshell, is the idea of the “limited sending rights”-feature, which has been implemented on the recently launched Nextfeeds.com platform.

The next posts will deal with other features on NextFeeds.com that also aim to reduce information overload, however in slightly different ways.

So: what do you think about this approach? Does this make any sense? Your comments are very welcome.

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1) RSS is designed to deliver messages from publishers to subscribers on a frequent basis and not suitable for alerts and notifications which typically do not occur very often. For example, when subscribing to an RSS Feed on a personalized news page (e.g. iGoogle), the user expects an ongoing delivery of new messages as otherwise he would be looking at the same messages over and over again.

Also, RSS implies a higher risk that single messages do not get read as new messages push out old ones (in the example of the personalized news pages like iGoogle). However, especially for alerts it is important that they get read. A message from an email, however, is sitting in the subscribers inboxes until it is deleted.

Hard to believe, but still true: NextFeeds.com, our new service to help users tackle information overload, has finally launched (beta). We will be writing about NextFeeds’s ideas in the upcoming posts. Until then, please have a look at the service and tell us what you think. We always appreciate any kind of feedback that helps us to further improve the service.

Yesterday I stumbled upon the interesting new service Filtrbox which also aims to help users to deal with information overload in a better way.

If you are using Google News Alerts, you know that you can make google send you only news articles that contain certain keywords, and also exclude articles using a minus in front of the keyword.

Filtrbox basically does the same, however with some nice enhancements:

• Suggestion of keywords: after an initial keyword has been entered, filtrbox displays a cloud of additional tags that might be interesting to add/ exclude in your filtr
• More user friendly interface: users can drag & drop suggested keywords to include or exclude them
• Preview: you can watch what your filtr retrieves in real-time, making optimizing your filtr easy

Beyond that, you can also apply a “filtrrank” to your filtr, which means excluding articles that don’t score high in the filtrbox ranking scale, which is a combination of “contextual relevance, popularity and users feedback” - we will see how well this works.

Filtrbox is certainly a useful service and I might be using it instead of google news alerts. At the moment however, being in private beta, the news sources seem to be rather limited, e.g. it retrieved no article for the search term “information overload”. Maybe that’s because the founders think that with their service there won’t be information overload any longer, but I doubt that ;-)

Anyway, useful service, check it out.

Is this a joke? Surprisingly, it’s not.

At first thought it seems to be an unbreakable rule that in order to expand our knowledge, we need to take in (”consume”) new information. Unfortunately, finding relevant information and consuming it takes time and effort - especially in today’s world of information overload this can be quite tedious.

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we did not have to consume any information and still expand our knowledge as shown in the following picture, therefore sidestepping information overload?

Believe it or not, but there is a way to achieve this. The secret lies in reliable alert services that only inform you if a specific happening has occurred, therefore also telling you something if they keep quiet (so that you know nothing has happened).

One example: you subscribe to an alert service that notifies you if a US tennis player wins a tournament on the ATP tour. If you haven’t received an alert for the last two months and somebody asks you about it, you could tell him that in the last 2 months no US player has won a tournament - without actively following the tennis results.

In other words, you have increased your knowledge over time without having had to consume any information. The beauty of reliable alert services is that they don’t just provide value when they inform you but also if they keep quiet.

Many examples can be found where such alert services would be very useful. The problem today, however, is that it’s not easy to find those alert services. Or very often, they do not exist at all.

NextFeeds.com, a soon-to-be-launched web service, will provide a platform for users to subscribe to a wide range of alert services free of charge and also setup new ones. You can preregister if you want to be informed upon launch.

Kevin Rose started out with a mere $200 funding. Within 18 months, his internet application Digg has become one of the most visited technology media sites and made it into the top 1,000 sites on the net. As a result, estimation of Digg’s current market value go high, reaching $300 milllion and more.

The reason for Digg’s amazing success seems to be obvious: Digg provides a platform for users to vote on articles, these votes then serve as a guideline for other users to identify the needles (good articles) in the haystack, therefore helping to deal with information overload in a better way.

As Techcrunch points out, this is not only Digg’s secret: many successful Web 2.0 services aim to make it easier for people to deal with the mountain of information they are facing every day. And due to the scope of the information overload problem (in my opinion one of the biggest of all, check out The real costs of information overload and IO: The Silent Burden) the value of those services is directly correlated with it – making the ones that really help to deal with information overload highly successful very quickly.

However, in order to understand Digg’s success in detail (and also where its limits are) it is required to digg deeper…

Starting with Diggs value proposition “making it easier to find good articles”: what does “good” actually mean in this context? What are the different factors that make an article “good” and how does Digg help to find those articles?

In the following chart I’ve put down the main factors that I consider to make an article worth reading:

Although the importance of those factors is subjective**, the categories themselves are likely to apply to all readers (did I forget anything?).

The question is: Does Digg help to find the articles that score high in these dimensions? The answer is a mixed one. Digg does well in criteria 3 and 4 because it is relatively easy to get consensus among a crowd whether an article fulfills these. For example, most people would give the same answer when asked whether a certain article is well and humorously written.

However, the Digg algorithm struggles to retrieve articles that are relevant to the user (criteria 1 and 2) as relevancy is highly subjective. For some users the newest article on “The Best 10 SEO Tips” was exactly what they were looking for at that moment - for others it is just irrelevant. And by having to filter the articles to find those that are relevant, Digg falls short of delivering only the articles that the user is interested in.

An attempt to fill the gap will be NextFeeds.com, a free to-be-launched web application that will try out some new ideas to deliver only the relevant information to users (you can preregister to get informed upon launch). More about NextFeeds’ ideas in the following posts.

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* For instance, check out Victory for the Topless Front ;-)
** Also, this evaluation is not only different from person to person but my own motivation to read articles changes during the day as well: at work I need to focus on finding relevant information that I can use either immediately or later (categories 1 and 2), while after work it is also considerably important that I get a direct joy from reading articles (categories 3 and 4).

Information Overload is an interesting phenomenon. Everybody knows it’s a major obstacle to productivity but if you ask people you’ll find out that not many are thinking on how they can deal with it in a systematic way.

For instance, do you agree that information overload has a negative impact on your day? And: when have you last taken some time to consciously think how you can deal with it more effectively? I am not talking about quick fix solutions like simply cutting back on information consumption (which is often the subconscious solution), but really spending some time to come up with solutions that reduce the negative impact from information overload without running the risk of missing out on the important news.

For many their honest answer to these two questions implies a certain paradox. It might be a bold statement, but information overload may be a problem with one of the highest “negative impact” to “what is done about it”-ratios.

I’ve been thinking why this is the case and came to the conclusion that it’s mainly due to two factors: one is the incremental costs of IO, causing people to underestimate them, and the other is that information overload’s costs are not very well visible.

The incremental costs of IO can be demonstrated best if we try to quantify them. For instance Basex, a US research firm, made this attempt with a focus on costs due to interruptions from communication media. Basex starts looking at IO’s impact for a knowledge worker per hour before extrapolating it to the whole US economy. The damage that is done are frequent interruptions (reducing productivity) that only feel a little annoying at the moment we experience them. However, at the end of the day (or year), if we take all the costs together it has accumulated to something of enormous size.

I don’t want to get too philosophical here, but the underestimation of incremental things seems to lie in human nature. For example, most people have once realized with surprise how quickly the spending of small amounts of money can add up to something significant. Or if we first hear about interest rates’ impact over a longer period of time, e.g. if we invest in some financial products today, don’t touch or think about them over a decade, and then look to how much it has accumulated. The same phenomenon might be at work with information overload, causing us to underestimate the damage that is done overall.

However, information overload is even nastier than this. In the example with the money spending, we will realize it someday (when we see the bank statement at the latest!). Unfortunately there is nothing that counts the costs of information overload, so even after the damage has been done it is not very well visible. Thus we are not fully aware of the damages and we continue as we did before without adapting to deal with the problem.

Information overload can therefore be seen a silent burden that, despite its well-known existence, might still not get the full treatment it deserves. Every knowledge worker should at least spend some time to think about how to deal with IO in the best possible way – which will lead to a significant long-term increase in productivity. Some advice on this in one of the following posts.

For those of you who are interested, here is my comment on the information overload debate hosted by The Economist and CA (Computer Associates) as mentioned in the previous post:  

Technology’s aim never was to simplify our lives. It’s idea is to improve our lives. Simplicity is certainly correlated with the latter goal, but it is not the same. The proposition’s statement (“…if the promise of technology is to simplify our lives, it is failing”) is therefore based on a wrong assumption.

However, it does point to something that many people complain about: technology is often stated as the culprit of information overload causing lost productivity, diminished quality of thought, increased level of stress and so on.

But also this statement is not correct. It’s not the technology itself, but the higher expectations that are set by our line managers, our friends, and ourselves. We could simply stop using technology to get information (it’s optional after all) but we would fall behind in comparison to what our colleagues or friends know.

Therefore you could say that technology is indirectly responsible because it enabled the development to our society where we are expected to be on top of the news. However technology is one of humanity’s greatest achievements which improved our lives in so many ways; the propositions statement sounds a little as if technology as a whole is put on trial.

Information overload should be regarded as an indirect by-product of technology with some negative effects; now the focus should be on finding ways on how to reduce those effects. For this, technology itself might be the answer once again.

I have been a subscriber and devoted reader of The Economist, the by far best weekly news magazine I know, for almost 8 years now and was very pleased to get informed by them on a debate they are hosting in cooperation with CA (Computer Associates) that deals with information overload. The central statement, put forward by the “proposition”, states: 

“The house believes that if the promise of technology is
to simplify our lives, it is failing.” 

The debate is conducted according to the traditional Oxford-line debate rules, hosted by a moderator and taking place between two teams, the “proposition” and the “opposition”. In their own words:

”The proposition proposes a resolution for the debate ‘with constructive arguments and the use of supporting material.’ The opposition then opposes the resolution by rebutting these arguments and by bringing its own supporting material to bear. Traditionally, each side has three opportunities to advance its cause, through an opening speaker, a second speaker and a summator.” 

The Proposition’s opening statement has been posted on the website last Tuesday, and so has the Opposition’s opening statement. Also, the moderator had something to say as well to kick off the discussion. 

The debate will run through March 7, 2008. I will follow the discussion and leave comments; you are invited to do the same on The Economists debate page. You can also follow the discussion on facebook.

Here’s a list of useful websites/ resources I came across that deal with information overload or closely related subjects. Some of the articles/ studies are not the newest ones, but I preferred quality over publishing dates.

Blogs/ Websites with focus on information overload

• ManagingIO.com ;-)
• A Feed is Born - RSS as the redeemer of humanity from IO? Blog about RSS, webfeeds and information overload
• Communication Overload - Another blog devoted to IO  

 Articles worth reading 

• NY times article pointing to the $650 billion cost estimate of information overload published by a US research firm. The estimate might be still too low though.
• Information onslaught - IO is even bad for your health. 
• Plus, it makes you stupid: Emails ‘pose threat to IQ’ and Why texting harms your IQ
• Sometimes it also turns nasty: Being Held Hostage by Information Overload
• But not enough with that, it might even kill you: Information Overload Is Killing You and Your Productivity
• If we didn’t do it before: Informing ourselves to death - Well-written article on the subject by Neil Postman
• Information overload - Nice article on IO by William Van Winkle
• Data smog: newest culprit in brain drain - Psychologists also say IO is bad. Now if that’s no proof ;-)
• Combating Information Overload - Includes a history section on IO. How it all started…
• The Tyranny of Email - Correct, it’s a pain. Or is it? Tyranny revisted
• Too much information? - Yes, indeed. Looks at it from a marketing perspective.
• Internet suffering from information overload - So not only the users but the internet itself. Includes some good comments on how information will be structured in the future (directories vs. tagging)

 Studies and papers on IO 

• How much information? - Study that attempts to estimate how much new information is created each year
• IO’s impact - Report on the effects of information overload in the UK and worldwide  
• Desperately seeking: Helping hands and human touch - Looking at potential solutions to IO with a focus on agent-like applications, improvements in the information chain and information brokering
• The role of contextual clues in the creation of information overload (pdf) - Study focuses on IO due to email
• Information Overload, Retrieval Strategies and Internet User Empowerment (pdf) - Paper on information overload and search engines
• A Framework for Information Overload Research in Organizations (pdf) - How to analyze IO in organisations. Rather theoretical…

 Practical tips on how to deal with IO 

• Lifehack.org - Popular blog with tips on how to increase productivity (e.g. check out “Dealing with information overload”)
• Putthingsoff - Blog on productivity with a cute cat
• Managing Information - A practical guide on how to focus on the information that is really required
• Information Overload: The Blogger’s Worst Enemy and 8 Ways to Avoid It - Tips for Bloggers on how to deal with IO
• How to reduce information overload - Useful tips
• Eight steps to thriving on information overload - As the title says…
• Tips for Mastering E-mail Overload - Also have a look at Tips for Overcoming Email Overload
• Handling Information Overload for Lawyers - They are different, that’s why they need special care ;-)
• 21 Tips to deal with information overload - Useful tips!
• Other blogs on productivity: Productivity501 and Simple Productivity Blog

 Other resources

• Information Overload Newsletter - Newsletter with articles on information overload, however many articles on other subjects too
• Change and Information Overload - Article on the negative effects of information overload (published on Feb. 19^th 1999, but still true…)
• Article on Softpanorama.org - Including some interesting statistics on the subject (although a little outdated)
• Fighting information overload - Article on knowledge management software (a little outdated too, 2001…)

Something missing on this list? Share it by commenting to this post!