Information Onslaught

Last Tuesday I had a drink over at my neighbor’s house and saw that they had their television set to Obamas State of the Union Address. I offered to come back later or listen to it with them.  We ended up chatting while there was a long segment of congress people and senators walking into the room and greeting each other and by the time I left the President had only just started speaking. I thought to myself, that they should have started the program and timed it to start with the actual address.  

I was little surprised when the next day a poll showed that most viewers didn’t stay on the channel long enough to listen to the speech.  Of course not!  We have 8 (!) seconds (!) in a YouTube video to engage our audience, then they’re gone.  TV shows might get a whopping 90 seconds.  

There are too many things tugging at our sleeve to pay attention to things at length anymore and I’m not talking about children or attention seeking pets and husbands.  When I try to settle into a longer article I actually get a bit jumpy and page to the back to see how long my commitments is going to be and if I want to even start to engage.  Books for fun (and I used to be a voracious reader) have been relegated to the vacation back burner and even then I have to make a time commitment to read a few books.  

The other day I heard an interview on TV (while I was either cooking, exercising or cleaning up social emails) where Tom Brokaw (I think) was talking about a new book and said, that today it’s not enough anymore to read the local newspaper and a few trade magazines and listen to the radio on the way to work and watch the evening news.  We ALSO need to plow through a plethora, or should I say onslaught of information form the net.

I WISH I had time to do all the things Tom Brokaw listed – I’m glad if I manage the New York Times and my Swiss weekly newspaper and the morning news. The blogs I subscribe to get a quick glance and I have an ever growing list of blog entries I have to read, I WANT to red, but oh, so little time. 

We thought reading and writing was dead! Social media has changed that to a certain extent; even if the social media prose is not what we (old people) learned in school. I’m reading a New Yorker article (yes, I know) about the kid that was spied on by his roommate in college and committed suicide after the roommate blasted the internet with the news that he was gay and showed video of him engaging with another man.  The article shows excerpts from the texts that went back and forth between these college freshmen and their friends. I’m reading “IDC”, what?  IDC? I don’t care.  My favorite was that the article was full of “WTF”.  We can now officially use the “F” bomb in a reputable magazine because it’s not spelled out, just WFT.  But, I digress.

So, where does this leave us? In a world where we need to be ever more expert at what we do and retreat into a smaller niches to then find out that we have kinda lost the bigger picture (think onion peel) of your work world, your kids world, your community world, your country world and let’s not forget, art, literature, the latest food fad and the newest technological advances, what your phone can REALLY do and you had no clue?  This morning on the news (NY1):  the app is dwindling.  Today the average user uses less than five apps in a week. They didn’t say how much that’s down from before but my guess is SIGNIFICANTLY.  At some point we have to do the dishes and get some work done. 

I circle back to an earlier post on: Curation and the Human Algorithm. I think curation of information will become ever more important to help us manage knowledge without going under in a sea of distractions and inert information. 

How do YOU manage your information flow?  How have your habits change since the first onslaught of social media and blogging?  Are you digging out from under?

Curation, the Human Algorithm & the Future of Social Media

There are two expressions I keep coming across in reading about the future of everything that’s web-based and, social media in particular: “content curation” and the “human algorithm”.

The definition of curation is that it’s the caretaking or presentation of things entered into a collection, either physical or digital. With the onslaught of information from all sides, some sort of curation needs to be implemented to collect, filter, verify and disseminate news, entertainment, human interaction in the broadest sense.

An Algorithm, according to Wikipedia is an effective method expressed in mathematics and computer science as a finite list of well-defined instructions for calculating a function. (Gosh I don’t miss math classes). Algorithms are used for calculation, data processing and automated reasoning. So in a way, an algorithm is the mathematical brother of more artsy curation.

So where does curation and the human algorithm come to play? Where curation means that people manually verify and decide what content to present regardless of the readers on-line behavior, the human algorithm is a program fed by ‘trust agents’ to get you real-time information you’re looking for based on your previous on-line behavior and searches. The human comes as much from your behavior as it does from the behaviors of millions of other on-line users that share some of your on-line habits. However the above mentioned ‘trust agents’ are key.

In curating or in programming the challenge lies to find trustworthy sources and networks of followers with ‘good reputations’. Tweets and social content needs to be tied to networks of so-called trust agents and their sub group of followers. Connectivity – being linked to and linking – is the most important thing to attain trustworthy status.

Somebody with a whole lot of followers on Twitter who has a lot of “links” and “recommendations” will, in a Google search on that person, come up over another person with similar content but lesser reputation and trust. This kind of ranking is referred to as the “human algorithm” – I’m oversimplifying this.

You might want to read the following: Brian Solis on “The Human Algorithm and how Google ranks Tweets in real-time Search”, Mark Little of Storyful: “The Human Algorithm”, which really talks about curation and Mathew Ingram of Gigaom writing about the ”Future of Media: Curation, Verification and News as a Process”. The last two articles are bit redundant, but both talk extensively about the verification process of actual news stories, which is fascinating and labor intensive.

And to round it up: Soren Gordhamer from Mashable talks about the Future of Social Media and the three pressing questions regarding the future of social media: distraction, filter, and capacity.

The first is self-explanatory and so is the third, but I would like to expand on the second a bit, filter: increasingly search engines give us information they THINK we want to see. If you where to Google your neighbor from your home computer and then again from a coffee shop you could quite likely get entirely different results. Google, Bing and other search engines are filtering the search for you based on your browsing history, social media interactions and on-line purchasing habits. This brings Gordhamer to ask for three options: filtering needs to be transparent, we need to be able to make choices in the filtering applied and there needs to also be an unfiltered option.

Gordhamer’s observation is; as we will be increasingly inundated, overwhelmed and clogged up with irrelevant and relevant information with still only 24 hours a day. The new paradigm is no longer the questions of the many different ways of sharing on line, but the question of RELEVANCY.

And with relevancy being the new paradigm shift in the near future of social media we are back to curation and human algorithms. He/she who makes the most noise will be heard! What else is new?