Comments on: Information Overload Is a Filter Problem

By: Oren Simon

Oren Simon — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 17:02:59 +0000

There is machine traffic and then there is human traffic – they are not
the same – they are not even close.
It’s like the difference between the pressure waves of voice passing
through air from my mouth to your ear and the dialog we are having.

A key question in my mind is what is a human level network? Can it
emerge from the machine level network?

I believe that when crossing over from the machine to the human – on
that borderline lurks the fundamental flaw which was designed in as a
feature – you cannot and should not build the infrastructure for human
interaction as you do for machines – they are fundamentally different
stuff altogether. Humans are intelligent beings with free will – there is no good-for-all, or even reasonable-to-many, way to provision them with the right piece of information at the right time – all the time.

There is no standard user – no such thing – and users expect something different by definition. Generalizing, coming top down trying to figure out what question to answer (at the machine level there is always a predefined question (or a valid way to generate it) to answer) cannot answer a question that only I can ask – in my context! – This is the key: my questions are asked in my context – the only way to filter out what is not a valid FOR ME answer is in my context.

To cross to the human network we need to build something much more
organic, something in which a unique solution, built of many micro
elements running all over the place – collaborating while serving
individual users in their own individual way – all this must happen on
top of a contextification strata so there is a chance for a human level
dialog in any meaningful sense.

By: Why the end of filters matters to advertisers « People like to share

Why the end of filters matters to advertisers « People like to share — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:55:39 +0000

[...] Information Overload Is a Filter Problem [...]

By: John

John — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 01:34:50 +0000

There is another problem. Filtering information you post on the web. People are too lazy to find tools that will protect their phone, email or credit cards. There are tools though and some of them are free. The main issue is how to educate the user. Check out http://blog.arzoola.com/. They are trying to take a lead on educating users on Privacy 2.0 thingy.

By: Joe Kraus

Joe Kraus — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:43:00 +0000

Great post. Note that I am an academic science librarian, so my view is distorted through that lens. Concerning the collapse of the financial markets, it was caused by an “irrational exuberance” that house prices would continue to increase MUCH greater than inflation, thus mortgage bankers assumed that people with low credit scores would have no problem with variable rate loans, or interest only loans. This flawed logic created the credit crisis.

Concerning the problem of filtering terabyte and petabyte amounts of data, librarians have done a reasonably good job of creating metadata that helps people figure out what 500 page book would be useful from maybe 5 lines of subject headings. What the information world needs now is better evaluation and indexing tools, in addition to the searching and finding tools.

As a science librarian, I know there is a TON of scientific data behind all of the research and journal articles. There are plenty of publishers, vendors, software companies and people who have different ways of approaching the problem. I am not sure how the search and find market will shake out in 5-10 years, but I bet Google is in the mix somewhere. Let’s just home they don’t do anything evil with all of the data they have.