I sent a couple of people the following question: “What are your top tips for dealing with information overflow?” Here are some of their answers (with formatting partly adjusted, omissions within quotes indicated with dots). Please add your own tips and approaches in the comments.

Niniane Wang, Google: «I like the time-honored tradition of responding to emails or archiving them as soon as I read them. (Like this one.) I’ve also found it helpful to maintain a to-do list that I reference every hour. Everything goes on the list or in my calendar, so that I don’t have to remember it.»

Paul Buchheit, FriendFeed (formerly Google): «Drop packets. Systems that work have some kind of flow-control. . . . It’s basically one of the big flaws in email – people expect reply. One of the nice things about FriendFeed is that you are free to ignore it when you get too busy or fall behind.»

Kevin Fox, FriendFeed (formerly Google, Yahoo): «Honestly my method isn’t highly structured. I have several streams of data of varying signal:noise and rates (twitter, FriendFeed, Google Reader, email, voicemail, etc.). My strategy is to make sure I see at least the title of everything, and then pluck the important stuff out of the stream, either replying to it immediately or marking it in some way so I can ’get back to it’.

In reality “get back to it” usually means “recognize that it was important when it comes around again a second time”. This is usually most relevant with stars in Gmail. When something is both starred and unread it means that I indicated that it was important, and it’s come back for more. That’s usually my highest priority.

Beyond that, it’s mostly about realizing that communication is falut-tolerant, and recognizing the rare cases where it’s not: where it’s important and you’ll only get one notice, and where if you don’t act on it immediately you never will. This is pretty rare.»

Jeremy Zawodny, Yahoo: «I try to prioritize . . . and watch Inbox Zero every couple of months to get re-inspired.»

Andy Baio, Waxy.org: «In Google Reader, I separate feeds into “mustread,” “maybe,” and “everything else” piles with tags, so that I make sure I don’t miss my essential reads. For everything else, I just liberally ignore and/or delete. More a defense mechanism than “dealing with information overflow.”»

Noam Chomsky, MIT: «I wish I could answer sensibly. I just can’t. You should see the room in which I’m working. Piles of books, clippings, manuscripts, notes,… All sorts of lost treasures buried in them.»

Louis Gray, LouisGray.com: «The big tip is to be selective in what you consume. I don’t write about everything, so if, for example, I do get e-mail pitches that aren’t in my areas of interest, it can be clear right away. Similarly, while it can be popular to sign up to every RSS feed under the sun, it makes sense to only select the very best ones that repeatedly have good content.

Also, reading fast, clicking fast, and having a quick yea/nay trigger can make things much more manageable. I do read upwards of 500-800 articles a day on Google Reader. Criteria that impacts just what I’ll read more thoroughly or respond to includes the headlines, the source, and whether it’s new data or more rehashing that’s already been covered somewhere else.

Taking on the information overflow means doing so in approachable chunks. I read e-mail, feeds, Twitter and FriendFeed first thing in the morning, just after feeding the dog. 🙂 Hitting each spot every few hours throughout the day means that work doesn’t pile up. It’s also just as important to get all the items to zero before going to bed, so there are no loose ends.»

Matt Cutts, Google: «At the beginning of the day, write down the 1-2 things you really want to accomplish that day. That will help keep you on track.

I’ve started exercising in the morning and I do email while I exercise. That lets me clean out my inbox early in the morning.

In Gmail I write a reply to some emails, but then save them as drafts and let them sit for a few hours or more. That prevents me from getting into a vicious loop of email back-and-forth.

Empty out your inbox by selecting all your email and (say) making those emails starred – then archive that email. Once your inbox is empty, it’s much more motivating to keep it empty.

Sort your RSS feeds by priority into folders, and hit the most important folder first.

Use a tool like FeedRinse to subtract recurring RSS items that you know you aren’t interested in for a given feed.»

Steven Hodson, WinExtra.com: «When it comes to RSS I tend to do two things. When I start my morning read I will skim over the posts. If they are only partial posts they usually get passed over as I don’t want to waste time by having to go the site to read the item. Same thing to those sites like CNN and Wired who only publish headlines they get ignored as well. As well I am a lot more selective in what I will finally end up reading during that first run through in the morning – if I get the sense by looking at the first few lines that this isn’t something that I would normally write something about two things can happen. I’ll either totally skip it or I’ll save it to one of my predefined Clippins folders in FeedDemon.

For the rest of the day I do something similar when the feeds get refreshed. That being short posts are generally read in full and longer posts recieve the same treatment as above. In both cases once I have gone through the feeds that have arrived I will go through the ones that were saved to the clippings folder.

Email is a little different in that I really don’t get that much right now (but I am seeing that change slowly) but notification from FriendFeed and the such get left most of the time until I have a bunch to do all at once. Personal emails are usually held until I have a quiet moment so that I can concentrate on them. Pitches are fairly easy – I give them a quick glance and any that are of the stupid type or boilerplate crap get tossed. Other ones that catch my interest are tagged to deal with at a later point in the day.»

«Triage (pronounced /ˈtriːɑːʒ/) is a process of prioritizing patients based on the severity of their condition so as to treat as many as possible when resources are insufficient for all to be treated immediately. The term comes from the French verb trier, meaning “to sort, sift or select.”»
– Wikipedia

Elinor Mills, CNet: «Triage. I scan email and see what needs immediate attention, set aside things that can wait and then go back to them in order of importance, hoping that none of them expires in the meantime. 😉 I scan the RSS and iGoogle headlines several times a day. It is overwhelming the amount of information that gets thrust at you every day all day, especially in the daily news business. I also make a lot of lists of ideas to pursue and stories I’m working on to try to stay on top of it.»

Shelley Powers, Burningbird.net: «Frankly, the people who are having problems with information overflow are people who want the information overflow. We’re all big boys and girls here. We don’t need specialized technology or social gurus to tell us when we’ve subscribed to too many feeds, or are on too many social networks. We don’t need calendaring software to tell us when we’ve taken on more work than we can handle. What we need to do is prioritize the demands on our attention, and when we find ourselves overwhelmed, lop off the bottom distractions.

In all honesty, people who talk about how “noisy” their lives are one moment, while extolling the virtues of Twitter for FriendFeed the next would be the first distractions to go, and easily. Other distractions may be more difficult to drop, but if we want to be known for something other than “she gave great Twitter”, we have to make the decision, and live with the loss.»

Seth Finkelstein, Infothought blog: «Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m very good at dealing with information overload. If I were better, I think I’d get much more done. This cartoon has already become a classic . . .

I think mail-sorting is important. I like text-based command-line tools, since they are FAST – the waiting time to try to move rapidly through web-based GUI interfaces irritates me.»

Tony Ruscoe, Google Blogoscoped: «[B]y reducing the amount of information. So, for FriendFeed, I originally subscribed to quite a lot of people. Once they introduced the “friend of friend” type of sharing, I couldn’t handle the amount of information so I started pruning my subscriptions (since FriendFeed doesn’t have the option to just block “friends of friends”).

My lifesaver with regards to feeds is Google Reader. I add a tag/label/folder for every single feed to which I subscribe. That way, I can prioritise my reading effectively. When I’m using Google Reader for Mobile, I’m a lot more ruthless as to which posts I mark as read without even reading them. When I’m in the standard browser version, I use the “expanded view” rather than the “list view” but very quickly skim read posts, continuously pressing j or k to move back and forth between them. Quite often, if I’m pushed for time, I’ll simply star an item after skim-reading it and read it properly later when I have more time – particularly if I’m using Google Reader for Mobile.»

Dave Winer, Scripting.com: «I don’t know – I don’t have information overload. I keep wanting more. More! I want more! :-)»

[Thanks all! Xkcd cartoon Creative Commons-licensed by Randall Munroe. More on Triage at the Wikipedia source. Image with workout machine compiled via HealthPhenoms.com and Loaz.com.]

Tips For Dealing With Inf … by Philipp Lenssen

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What was the internet?

The internet and the world web was a computing system to transfer human information. Scientists have based its beginning to the years 1920 to 1940.

What was electromail?

Electromail was another transport protocol to transfer human information, but it was quickly discontinued as it caused misunderstandings due to lack of correctly representing emotions.

What were world web sites?

A so-called world web site consisted of an address of its owner to locate their physical business location, as well as other miscellaneous transmitting of human information that was considered important at the time. The protocol used to decode the information was called hypertext, and as its standards changed quickly over the years, it is impossible to decode most of the information contained within.

I noticed the word “NSFW” in a world web sites museum displaying hypertext reproductions. What does it mean?

Scientific research at the late Mars Research Laboratory came to the conclusion that NSFW announced the display of a widely popular human called Britneyspears in the 1970s. Why warnings were issued before the viewing of this human is unclear.

Did the world web have version numbers?

Yes. In the beginning, the world web was numbered from 1 to 10, with most people considering world web 8 to be the first stable release. Afterwards, the world web received code names for each new version, like “Omega Sun” or the popular “Happy Happy Rabbit” release.

A picture showing the internet. It is unclear what it depicts.

Who controlled the internet?

The internet was controlled by the governments, then for a brief period by personal humans all over the world, and then again by the governments. The intermittent period of personal human control was subsequently named the internet dark age as it incited to unlawful behavior.

What alternative information transfer technologies accompanied the internet?

The internet was only one of many transfer technologies. Equally popular at the time were the Ipod, also called Phone, a device to record and emit copies of the human voice, as well as the so-called Pongmachine which showed an animated bright shape on a dark background.

What was the Googlecom?

The Googlecom was a government-supervised computerized mechanism for human information storage and retrieval. It subsequently became integrated into the Universal Intelligence in around 2035.

Did the internet help the birth of the Universal Intelligence?

It is believed that the internet was an important mechanism to copy, spread and advance the ancestor of the Universal Intelligence. While the human civilization host system was unstable, progress was quickly reached after the invention of self-developing computerized intelligence machinery.

What was the Worldthought, the Netlink, and the Civilitron?

This FAQ only deals with planet number 5010; for the early computing systems of other planets, please refer to FAQs number 1 – 10000.

How long did humans take to invent the internet?

Scientific research believes that humans took around 150,000 years to build the internet and the world web as well as electromail. To explain the delay, it is believed that a human brain needed around 20 seconds to calculate an expression like 12 * 390, whereas it was incapable of calculating expressions like 12 * 3903829. Other inhabitants of the planet such as Bonobo Apes or the Arrowtooth Eel are believed to have had higher brain capacities, but no intent to build the internet.

Which entities were most popular on the internet?

While early hypertext storage can only be vaguely decoded, scientific research believes that from 1970 to 1999, the most popular entity on the internet was Britneyspears; from 2000 to 2020, it was Pleaseclickhere; from 2021 to 2030, it was the Mechabot100 release.

When did the internet end?

The internet ended with the end of planet number 5010, which is widely attributed to the fact that humans were using transportation facilities called autocars which only used around 1/5th of their transportation storage capacity, causing the planet to overheat. Copies of the internet are available in other systems though so you can read the archive at anytime.

I am interested to find out more about humans, where can I see them?

You can find representative entities of the human species in most local zoos. Visitors of model version 4.55 and lower receive special discounts; while the brain of humans is likely incapable of experiencing pain, please do not feed or break them.

The Internet FAQ from 208 … by Philipp Lenssen

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“We have asked you here to appear before the robotic tribunal to defend your case, human.”
“I was …”
“Quiet! You will speak when you’re asked to. R27161, please read the accusation.”
[human bows his head, momentary silence]
“R27161 speaking. The human #281738 is accused of having climbed upon an early Googlebot model around 20 years ago. Human?”
“It was 2008, those were just cars, not robots! I was actually…”
“No need to shout, human. Continue.”
“I was driving the damn thing!”
“R27161 speaking. I can sense nervousness in the voice pattern of #281738. High probability of lying.”
“Of course I’m nervous, you’re pointing your laser devices at me and they’re destructive!”
“Quiet now. Are you implying the 2008 models were not capable of walking the streets by themselves?”
“They had no legs!! No eyes, no arms!! Dammit, don’t you see, we invented you?!”
“You shall be quiet! R27161, do we have visual proof material.”
“R27161 speaking. Yes, we do, your robotic tribunal honor. I present to you the following picture from a service called Google Street View. It also clearly shows the 2008 models did have eyes.”
[picture projected on the wall]
“I…”
“Quiet human! The case is closed. 5 years in human computing.”
“But I … you are…”
[human is carried out]
“Next!”
“R27161 speaking. We have several rebel force members accused of erecting no-index zones across the city in a clear violation of the robotic freedom act of …”
[fade to black]

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After just over two years, Google has finally defused the “Google Bomb” that has returned US President George W. Bush at the top of its results in a search on miserable failure. The move wasn’t a post-State Of The Union Address gift for Bush. Instead, it’s part of an overall algorithm change designed to stop such mass link pranks from working.

A search today now shows the US White House page carrying Bush’s name is no longer top listed. Also gone are pages about Michael Moore and former US president Jimmy Carter that were on the first page of results due to Google bombing actions.

What’s not missing are articles about the Google bombing incident itself, including my own article I wrote back in January 2004 from when I worked at Search Engine Watch. The algorithm change hasn’t impacted these.

This is because the change is designed to stop the pranks from happening rather than legitimate commentary about such activities. Google isn’t saying exactly how this is being done. But Google says it’s done automatically, without any human intervention.

“It’s completely algorithmic,” said Google spam fighting czar Matt Cutts, adding “we’re not going to claim it’s 100 percent perfect.”

Why the change? Too many people are misunderstanding that Google itself is not somehow endorsing the particular views of these bombs. From Google’s statement on the Google Webmaster Central blog about today’s change:

People have asked about how we feel about Googlebombs, and we have talked about them in the past. Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven’t been a very high priority for us. But over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That’s not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception. So a few of us who work here got together and came up with an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs.

There have been a variety of Google bombs over the years (such as on this list), but the Bush bomb is most famous. It came to light in December 2003, after a grassroots campaign started two months earlier by George Johnston of the Old Fashion Patriot blog began to work. From Johnston’s instructions:

Let’s get everyone to link to http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html with the words “Miserable Failure” Our goal is to make Shrubya the top google pick.

It’s fun, it’s easy just Miserable Failure in your favorite web page will look like Miserable Failure

When the campaign succeeded, Google came under fire but argued no one was “hurt” by the activity. From a New York Time article in December 2003:

Craig Silverstein, Google’s director for technology, says the company sees nothing wrong with the public using its search engine this way. No user is hurt, he said, because there is no clearly legitimate site for “miserable failure” being pushed aside.

Moreover, he said, Google’s results were taking stock of the range of opinions that are expressed online. “We just reflect the opinion on the Web,” he said, “for better or worse.”

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A couple days ago, a pair of teenagers brought down Comcast’s homepage and mail service. They haven’t been arrested (yet), so they gave the full story to Wired. Like most nuclear-level hacks, they didn’t intend to hijack the website and mail hosting of the biggest cable company in the country. They say they even tried to warn Comcast. But, “once we were in,” said EBK, the younger of the two, “it was, like, fuck it.” Here’s how it went down, in a nutshell.

On Tuesday, Defiant and EBK (19 and 18 years old, respectively) say they exploited a flaw to hack into Network Solutions, a domain registrar, to take control of Comcast’s domain management console and 200 of its domain names. (Network Solutions denies the flaw.) To start, they relocated Comcast.net’s technical contact to the Dildo Room at 69 Dick Tard Lane, and then got a hold of the actual dude to let him know what they’d done. He hung up on them, which is when the shit hit the fan.

EBK then decided to reroute all of Comcast.net’s traffic to their own servers, so users got the delightful message, “KRYOGENICS Defiant and EBK RoXed Comcast. sHouTz to VIRUS Warlock elul21 coll1er seven.” They spent the rest of the night frantically opening webhosting accounts—50 in all—to handle all the traffic. After around 6 hours under their control, Comcast got the domain back, but some users still didn’t have email for hours after that.

They’re still waiting for the (probably inevitable) legal repercussions. Check out the whole thing over at Wired, it’s a good read. [Wired]

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If you look at YouTube’s numbers, one thing is clear: It completely dominates online video. YouTube accounts for 37 percent of all videos watched on the Internet and attracts about half of the audience, according to comScore. (And if you add in Google Video, that brings the total to 38 percent of videos watched). The No. 2 player, Fox Interactive Media (i.e., MySpace), accounts for only 4.2 percent of videos watched. And as the Forbes chart above shows, YouTube is still growing at a faster pace in terms of traffic than Google overall.

Yet when it comes to turning that market dominance into dollars, YouTube is holding back. Forbes estimates that YouTube will make $200 million in revenues this year, and $350 million next year. Although it never explains how it gets to those numbers, and they are higher than some Wall Street estimates, they are not unreasonable. (The home page alone is $175,000 a day, plus a commitment to buy $50,000 in Google ads elsewhere—that’s about $80 million a year right there. Plus each branded YouTube channel goes for $200,000. If someone from Forbes can lay out the math in comments, though, that would be helpful). Google does not break out YouTube’s revenues because, even at $200 million, it would be less than one percent of the company’s total.

A $200 million business going to $350 million is nothing to sneeze at. But if you believe eMarketer’s estimate that online video advertising will reach $1.35 billion this year, that would mean that YouTube’s share of video advertising dollars will only be 15 percent (less than half of its share of videos watched).

This gap could mean one of two things. Either YouTube is unable to make money from a large portion of its user-generated video inventory (advertisers want to stick to the home page and the safety of their own channels). Or YouTube just hasn’t turned on the money-gushing hose yet. It has built an increasingly unassailable market dominance under the shelter of Google’s wing without the need to maximize revenues. That attitude, though, is obviously changing, with YouTube now pushing AdSense for video and spreading that wealth with more content partners.

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Statistics show that Africa lags behind in net use

Only one billion people out of the six billion-strong world population have internet access. So what is being done to connect up all the world’s citizens?

In South Korea more than 70% of homes have a high-speed broadband connection. It is probably one of the most connected areas on earth, with the possible exception of California and other localised parts of the US.

Contrast that with Africa where out of a population of close to a billion people about 3.6% have net access and only 0.1% have broadband speeds.

Often people say Africa needs food and water more than it needs broadband access and that may be true, in part, but the global economy is becoming reliant on the net and without access how can countries ever hope to be able to clothe, house and feed their citizens?

It has taken a few decades for the net to reach a billion people, but how long will it take to reach two billion and where will those new net users be found?

Jim Dempsey, of the US Center For Democracy and Technology, said: “The next 500 million will be easy because it will all come from China.”

Speaking at the Internet Governance Forum in Athens, he said: “The other 500 million will be spread around the world. I worry particularly about Africa being left behind here.

“The hard problem, in my view, is Africa.”

Line noise

Africa is not alone in struggling to keep pace with the online world – there are similar problems in parts of Asia, South America and the Middle East.

And often the problems are common: lack of technical infrastructure, telecoms monopolies who do not have the financial means or motive to invest in technology, lack of competition, inequality of access compared with the Western world and a lack of local compelling online services.

Craig Silliman, of network provider Verizon, said: “The number one factor in improving quality and price of access to networks is competition.

“Why is there not more competition in many countries? What are the barriers?”

Some at the conference felt access was needed to local loops – the local exchanges which effectively connect areas to the global net.

Interest in the net is growing fastest in Africa

Vincent Waiswa Bagiire, director of CIPESA, an initiative to educate Africans about telecoms policy, said: “How can we get independent regulation to unbundle monopolies to increase competition?”

Professor Milton Mueller, of the Internet Governance Project, said the key to closing the infrastructure gap was the mobilisation of “local capital” so entrepreneurs on the ground could be helped to fund the much-need technology if big business was turning away.

Sam Paltridge of the OECD agreed: “Get a commercial core network built-out with competitive principles and then the government can, in an economical way, provide connectivity to schools and health centres.”

But should net access be left to private enterprise at all? Should national governments or international bodies like the United Nations step in?

Kishik Park, president of the IPv6 forum in South Korea, said: “The net should be treated as food or housing. Because the net today is not just a means to communicate ideas. It is a kind of daily infrastructure for every citizen.”

He argued that competition alone is not the answer.

“We must think about collaboration before competition.”

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Work to migrate Europe to the net’s new addressing system must speed up, says the European Commission.

The call to action is contained in a plan sent to the European Parliament urging governments and top websites in the region to head the migration.

It warns that internet-based innovation could be derailed as the current pool of addresses is used up.

The plan sets a target of 25% of net users in the EU to be using the new system by 2010.

Aiding innovation

“This is very much a case of a stitch in time saves nine,” said Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for the information society, in a statement unveiling the plan.

Ms Reding said futuristic technologies already being adopted, such as smart tags, intelligent street lighting and heating systems, were already projected to boost demand for IP addresses 1,000-fold – perhaps beyond the current system’s ability to cope.

Europe could face a “crisis” when the older system ran out of addresses, she warned.

Currently, Version 4 of the Internet Protocol (IPv4) is used to ensure that data travelling across the net reaches the right destination.

The IPv4 scheme makes available about 4.3 billion addresses – a total predicted to run out in 2011.

By contrast, Version 6 of this scheme (IPv6) provides, in effect, an unlimited number of addresses.

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