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Information Overload...pah

A lot has been written recently about Information Overload...see this post on the Above and Beyond KM Blog and this one on the iLibrarian Blog

Much of the talk has come about because of this presentation by Clay Shirky entitled "It's not information Overload it's filter failure" in his presentation Clay suggests that Information Overload is an ancient problem going back to the age of the printing press.

All of the presentation is really interesting and I would encourage everyone to have a look at it. Clay talks extensively about how the internet has impacted our lives on a daily basis and cites some interesting true stories including one about Facebook. In this example one of his friends changed their relationship status from Engaged to Single and was bombarded by emails/phonecalls and other messages. This is an example of how setting a filter, in this instance a privacy filter is alien and not something the average user of Facebook would ever think to do, but not doing it contributes to Information Overload.

Strangely enough I've just written an "article" for the BIALL Newsletter on using filters and some sites which currently use filters to present information to users. This doesn't look specifically at the issue of Information Overload within Law Firms as it is much more general but it's good to see I'm on the ball...at least for now! I've also just purchased Clay's book "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations"so I'm looking forward to reading this.

Full post as published by LI Issues on October 06, 2008 (boomark / email).