Shooting the Moon

Information influx. Too much information. Sounds familiar? It’s profanely cliche! But this is the exact problem that caught my attention today, among my hectic schedule.

In the beginning of time, we had human operators reading signals from the Mainframe and react accordingly, or whose job was to respond to an incoming telephone call and put the caller through to the callee. Later on machines got blazingly fast, bandwidth got unimaginably enormous, which means we had to built automation in order to keep with the information flow. Nowadays (for the past 20 years) we have the Internet. And everything exploded. I used to think actual flesh explosion (18+ Rated) if we stuff all the information inside someone’s head. What to do?

Web portal surfaced, then comes the search engine that helps sort through information. We have blogs and feeds now that we can subscribe to according to our interests. We have to be careful though in narrowing down our selection. Still we have problems.

Example: Twitter. If you have a bunch of very active people that you follow, it becomes hard to keep up with the twit flow.

Example: In a chatroom scenario, say, Microsoft Office Communications Server Group Chat chatroom, which I have intimate knowledge with, which is a form of semi-async communication, if you join in the middle of heated discussion, it becomes hard to know what’s going on.

We definitely got a problem: how to specify criteria in a smart and effortless way what our interests are so we can better have the information sorted and ranked in the first place, and how to glean the gist from a sea of words in a split of second according to the crriteria just created?

Beats me.