Mark Lewis has written a piece over on Cnet about the need to flip the information delivery model. He writes:

“Web 2.0 flips the information delivery model upside down–it’s now about global access, and information at your fingertips, aggregated from sources that you don’t even necessarily know about, or care where they exist. Based on a set of search criteria, information in all its rich forms–media, video, audio, images, documents, text–all will be assembled together in context and delivered to users and applications for real-time experience.”

That’s a very poetic way of saying that in an age of hyper-choice, the most important challenge is to move beyond ‘What’s popular’ toward what’s ‘Personally Relevant‘.

I happen to also agree with Mark’s suggested implementation - Source agnostic aggregation filtered by persistent search (and Attention Profiling) and delivered in real-time.

We call it Particls.

With the announcement of Streamy and Thoof, however, Michael Arrington over on Techcrunch has declared that Personalized news is pointless and will never work.

He’s felt that way for a long time. I know… because he told me so while we were playing poker. A number of other people have suggested the same thing to me as well.

However, there are two things those people don’t understand.

1. Particls is not about Personalized News, it is about Personalized Alerting. We use the personalization part to rank content and determine how urgent the alert is for each user on an individualized basis.

   Thoof, Streamy and others are doing a very different (and worthwhile) job - and they are all potential partners of ours. We wish them the best of luck.

2. Just because something has not worked before does not mean it is not worth doing again and again until it’s done right. There is a place for popular, social news experiences (as Digg’s popularity has proved) and there is a place for targeted, personal and solitary news experiences (as Digg’s trolls and pop-culture content has proved).

Daniela recently pointed me to this Bear Stearns report via her blog post.

In it they make the same observations that I and others have been talking about for more than a year.

“User-Generated Content (UGC) Is Not a Fad…
Some investors remain skeptical that UGC is more than a passing fad. However, in our recent online video survey, UGC is the No. 1 and No. 2 most popular content category among men aged 18-34 (M18-34) and among all respondents, respectively. Moreover, if we define UGC as page views only from sites such as Myspace.com, Facebook.com, Youtube.com, Wikipedia.org, Blogger.com, and Digg.com (which is quite conservative), we estimate that UGC now accounts for 13% of total U.S. Internet traffic, up from 0%-1% in 2004. Based on these statistics, we submit that UGC is here to stay.”

Although using the term UGC is not great, their conclusion sounds very familiar to anyone reading this blog.

“apparent to us that as supply of video content rises, value will shift from content producers to aggregators and packagers of content that can best aid users in finding content that fits their specific interests”.

Of course, APML as a way of describing user interests, and Particls as a way of filtering and alerting users about new, personally relevant content, are both key technology pieces to this new media 2.0 reality.

Steve Rubel posts about his information saturation.

He writes:

We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore’s Law.

…

My attention has reached a limit so I have re-calibrated it to make it more effective. I think this issue is an epidemic. We have too many demands on our attention and the rapid success of Tim’s book indicates that people will start to cut back on the information they are gorging. If this happens en masse, will it cause a financial pullback? Possibly if ad revenues sag as a result.

Stowe Boyd writes in response:

No, I think we need to develop new behaviors and new ethics to operate in the
new context.

Most people operate on the assumption that the response to increased flow is to intensify what was working formerly: read more email, read more blogs, write more IMs, and so on. And at the same time motor on with the established notions of what a job is, how to accomplish work and meet deadlines, and so on.

In a time of increased flow, yes, if you want to hold everything else as is — your definition of success, of social relationships, of what it means to be polite or rude — Steve is right: you will have to cut back.

Who is right? Who is wrong? Maybe Steve is just old and Stowe is divining the new social consciousness.

Maybe Stowe is just being an extreme purist (Stowe? Never!) and just needs to recognize that there is middle ground.

Maybe the middle ground - Flow based tools that help to refine the stream.

Our eye scan handle the sun - but sunglasses are nice too.

Mary Hodder writes:

“I’m looking for some filter to go through and just grab what I need and not have to know about or read or watch the rest, or reply to it, unless I want to and it fits in with an event or need or desire.”

I’m looking forward to hear her thoughts and feedback about Particls.

I’m concerned, though, about a few people who have responded to her post (either in comments or their own blog posts) saying ‘Just turn all that stuff off’.

That’s exactly the scenario we are trying to avoid with Particls - a worldwide user base of social participants turning off from information burnout.

Recently I have observed that we, as early adopters, use an enormous amount of implicit and explicit Metadata when making feed reading decisions.

When skimming our thousands of items a day we are actually making value judgements based on who the author is, what the headline reads (and what we think the topic is based on the headline), if there are any pictures to catch our eye and so on and so on.

When we come across a blog, I think that most people look for the subscriber count and consider (at least at the back of their mind and as part of a larger value judgement) whether or not they should add the author to their subscription list based on how authoritative that number makes them. Adding someone to your feed list is a relatively big decision. So the ’subscriber count’ metadata is important.

The problem though, is that mainstream users don’t know this metadata. They don’t know that engaget is the top gadget blog. They don’t know that Chris Messina is an authority on OpenID and Microformats and they don’t know what constitutes a small or large subscriber count. They also don’t know about Technorati and therefore don’t know how to check a blogs rank before consider the weight to place on the post.

R. Todd Stephens writes an article asking us to imagine a world without metadata. It’s a fascinating prospect.

He gives the following real-world example:

“Now imagine walking into your local grocery store, and you notice all of the traditional taxonomies have been removed because product classifications are a form of metadata. The aisle signage has been removed. The only things you can see are the blank containers designed for the products themselves. Let’s suppose you need soup to go with Saturday’s dinner. You grab a can and begin to shake it in hopes that the weight and movement can provide you with some indication of the contents. Is it tomato soup or a can of beans? Perhaps it is a can of peaches or mixed vegetables. Or, maybe you’re an experienced shopper who can distinguish between soup and other products. Is it chicken noodle soup, vegetable soup or clam chowder?”

He also talks about metadata without context using foreign travellers as an example.

“My wife and I ran across this in the Atlanta airport a few months ago when traveling overseas. A woman standing outside the train car that moved travelers from the concourse to the travel gates was having a problem understanding the metadata information that was all around her. She asked us if we knew any Spanish, to which my wife replied, “Un poquito,” or just a little. She started to reel off sentence after sentence, trying to explain to us her issues. The best we could do was to hand her off to another couple that knew much more Spanish than we did. Here is the point: as a traveler, she was surrounded by all the information and metadata she needed to either get her luggage or head to the departure gate. She simply couldn’t understand the information she needed to take action.”

I think that mainstream users are just like foreign travellers. They lack the understanding to use all the metadata ques to filter information quickly in a flooded feed reader.

I think that if mainstream Media and business management want to reach their audience, then we need to give them a way of helping users get important content by making metadata

a. Easier to understand.
b. Collectively factored and contributory to a single Personal Relevancy rank.

Earl Mardle has written a post about Scoble’s Social Media Overload post and quoted the part where Robert quotes me (yes confusing).

“[...] That leads Chris Saad to ask when we’re going to get overloaded? Oh, Chris, we’re well past that point.”

Earl then writes a very interesting response.

“He’s right, we’re past it. Can we just stop talking about information overload? We’ve been told about every 12 months for the last decade that we are “suffering” from information overload and the net result has been that every following 12 months we have found ways to multiply the amount of information that comes pouring through our connections.”

I also think he’s right. Talk about Information Overload is like talking about air - it just is. However, Robert actually misquoting me. I was not asking about information overload. My question to Robert was actually about scaling the social aspects of social media.

The premise is that consuming information is one thing, but interacting and responding with people is another. My question was how many people can you possibly have 1:1 meaningful interactions with. Can Scoble really add hundreds of names and connect with each of them? Maybe so - but could Oprah add all her audience as friends (thus converting them into participants)? Obviously not.

Forgetting that for a moment though, Earl goes on to make a great point about the concept of Information Overload:

“I have a theory; the ‘real world” creates and dumps on us levels of information via multiple senses that is many, many orders of magnitude deeper in bandwidth than anything that we can even conceive of coming across the net. Our ability to contact, filter, manage, organise and act on that information is already honed to a very high degree.

Even increasing device-based information tenfold represents a trivial increase in that information load and we actually have no problem dealing with it. To invert Parkinson’s Law, our ability to handle information expands in direct proportion to is availability.

Earl’s corollary; once we realise that there are deeper wells of information to be drawn on, we dive in.”

I think that is a fascinating perspective on the issue. I have never seen anyone think about it in quite that way. Maybe information overload is a myth. Maybe we can each scale up our bandwidth as our needs require. Maybe scaling up isn’t even necessary - as Early suggests, maybe our senses are far more capable than we imagine.

Interesting…

I am sure some help with our senses would come in handy though - after all - most of us use sunglasses to help filter the sun right?

Phil Morle has just posted about the information overload and media 2.0 scale issues I have been covering lately and he makes an excellent point:

“We are becoming good filters, but poor philosophers. We are good at information retrieval and storage and not so good at the long-thought. We need machines to become better at filtering media 2.0 - show us the important stuff, let us get into the background stuff if we have the time and let us trust that we aren’t missing anything. We need time to think.” [Emphasis added]

To put it another way, I wonder if we have more information… but less understanding.

Just like 24 hour news networks (who suffer from too much chatter and not enough context), we spend so much time trying to keep up with, comment about and clip/snip/remix everything we may have forgotten how to keep perspective.

Watching Robert Scoble’s presentation about “Living in a Google World” it struck me that he has learned a lot about filtering information for himself. He admits he does a lot of his filtering based on how a post or headline might catch his eye, and also by a learned sense of authority about the author of a post.

It’s great that people like us have time to process all this information and think deeply about information consumption and trends.

But I think most people don’t have time.

Knowledge workers have traditionally had the benefit of analyst reports and high-quality premium data to give them insight into emerging trends.

Now, however, there is a need for them to join the real-time conversation and filter information for themselves. How will this affect their ability to synthesize new ideas and keep their eye on long-term opportunities?

I fear most people will end up in a reactive echo-chamber world with very little original thought because they are too busy just trying to keep up. Or maybe that’s nothing new?

I’d like to think there is a better way…

BBCs Click website has recently published an article about Technology Addiction. I think I have a problem

Prof Kakabadse added: “It’s addiction to portable technology, which you take with you practically to bed, the cinema, to the theatre, to a dinner party. The symptoms are, like with any other addiction, that people spend more time using their technology than spending it in socialising or in family time.”

Also there is a good section dedicated to how the medium is the message.

For instance, an e-mail can wait two days to be answered but a text message demands an almost immediate reply.

Stefana Broadbent from Swisscom said: “E-mail is considered the most formal. At the other end of the spectrum SMS is the most personal of all.

“That’s where we find all those little exchanges, little endearments, what we call grooming, which is sending: ‘I think about you. How did it go? How did you sleep?’

He added: “That is actually given by the number of characters. With such few characters, you have to have a lot of mutual understanding and mutual knowledge.”

But it’s not all bad news… apparently it forces us to get smarter.

“Studies have been done showing that people can actually enhance their cognitive abilities, which helps them to process more information at the same time. And their performance even transfers to other tasks.”

Perhaps one day we can just double space our brains and jack a fibre optic cable into our ears.

Marjolein just pointed me to a post by Kirk Biglione (Kirk.. great name).

He has just published a post called “My Life as an RSS Junkie“. I feel sorry for him. 1000 feeds and counting.

He (rightly?) blames Nick Bradbury for his addictions. I too would like to blame Nick - his app is the first I tried and I still use it to this day. It started me on this wonderful journey of RSS reading. Maybe a class action is in order? Just kidding Nick

He writes:

Things really started going down hill around the time I discovered FeedDemon. Damn that Nick Bradbury! With FeedDemon I was tracking nearly a thousand feeds a day. I’d focus on the topics I was most interested in by setting up watch lists. At first I thought that FeedDemon was helping me to effectively manage my information addiction. On the contrary, the problem was actually getting worse. I eventually realized that the more blogs I read, the more blogs I subscribed to. Each day I’d add a dozen new feeds to FeedDemon. It was a vicious circle. My feed reading began taking up larger chunks of my day.

At some point I came to my senses and realized that I had a serious problem. I had become overwhelmed by the sheer number of feeds that I’d subscribed to.

I am not sure if Kirk is the right user for Touchstone though. Kirk is the sort of user who needs to know what every post in every feed says. He could use it in conjunction with FeedDemon to get alerts about important posts when he is doing other things… but by the sounds of it he doesn’t do other things.

Good luck Kirk - sign up to the mailing list and give Touchstone a try. I’d be fascinated to hear if it helps.

Looks like social media is not dead after all - but only just being born.

Stowe Boyd posts about his painful experience with a group of PR people as they talk about how to make ‘Social Media Press Releases’ - apparently they totally missed the point.

Brian Oberkirch also posts along similar lines talking about the fear felt in PR firms when trying to craft new forms of press releases and start blogs.

He hits the nail on the head:

“Blogs aren’t killing traditional media — attention scarcity and the decay of their business models is. Craigslist and other efficient attention allocators are draining media revenues, not East Chumuckla Joe and his online opinions about the Iraq war. Likewise, social media aren’t a replacement or extension of your traditional marketing tools. The question isn’t whether an online press release format should replace a traditional one. It’s much more gamechanging than that. Given the erosion of the traditional media system and the extension of a much more connected, distributed information ecosystem, how should companies communicate with those who matter to their business?”