For decades, computers have been helping us to remember, but now it's time for them to help us to ignore.
Take email: Endless engineer-hours are poured into stopping spam, but virtually no attention is paid to our interaction with our non-spam messages. Our mailer may strive to learn from our ratings what is and is not spam, but it expends practically no effort on figuring out which of the non-spam emails are important and which ones can be safely ignored, dropped into archival folders, or deleted unread.
For example, I'm forever getting cc'd on busy threads by well-meaning colleagues who want to loop me in on some discussion in which I have little interest. Maybe the initial group invitation to a dinner (that I'll be out of town for) was something I needed to see, but now that I've declined, I really don't need to read the 300+ messages that follow debating the best place to eat.
I could write a mail-rule to ignore the thread, of course. But mail-rule editors are clunky, and once your rule-list grows very long, it becomes increasingly unmanageable. Mail-rules are where bookmarks were before the bookmark site del.icio.us showed up -- built for people who might want to ensure that messages from the boss show up in red, but not intended to be used as a gigantic storehouse of a million filters, a crude means for telling the computers what we don't want to see.
Rael Dornfest, the former chairman of the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference and founder of the startup IWantSandy, once proposed an "ignore thread" feature for mailers: Flag a thread as uninteresting, and your mailer will start to hide messages with that subject-line or thread-ID for a week, unless those messages contain your name. The problem is that threads mutate. Last week's dinner plans become this week's discussion of next year's group holiday. If the thread is still going after a week, the messages flow back into your inbox -- and a single click takes you back through all the messages you missed.
We need a million measures like this, adaptive systems that create a gray zone between "delete on sight" and "show this to me right away."
RSS readers are a great way to keep up with the torrent of new items posted on high-turnover sites like Digg, but they're even better at keeping up with sites that are sporadic, like your friend's brilliant journal that she only updates twice a year. But RSS readers don't distinguish between the rare and miraculous appearance of a new item in an occasional journal and the latest click-fodder from Slashdot. They don't even sort your RSS feeds according to the sites that you click-through the most.
There was a time when I could read the whole of Usenet -- not just because I was a student looking for an excuse to avoid my assignments, but because Usenet was once tractable, readable by a single determined person. Today, I can't even keep up with a single high-traffic message-board. I can't read all my email. I can't read every item posted to every site I like. I certainly can't plough through the entire edit-history of every Wikipedia entry I read. I've come to grips with this -- with acquiring information on a probabilistic basis, instead of the old, deterministic, cover-to-cover approach I learned in the offline world.
It's as though there's a cognitive style built into TCP/IP. Just as the network only does best-effort delivery of packets, not worrying so much about the bits that fall on the floor, TCP/IP users also do best-effort sweeps of the Internet, focusing on learning from the good stuff they find, rather than lamenting the stuff they don't have time to see.
The network won't ever become more tractable. There will never be fewer things vying for our online attention. The only answer is better ways and new technology to ignore stuff -- a field that's just being born, with plenty of room to grow.
— Cory Doctorow, Internet activist, blogger, founder of Boing Boing
To pile on the haystack thread ... down our narrow trough of the information tsunami, our clients must also identify critical regulatory compliance in a timely (nee immediate) manner.
In addition to reader interest relevance, the availability of structured tools for source authority and authentication would be a godsend.
He posted this in his blog "Matt's Idea blog" which he describes as providing "Original
thoughts on productivity, personal information management, creativity,
journaling, personal digital storage for life, and leveraging
technology for citizenship".
For me this blog is an important discovery in an area in which I have a direct interest. Just as important is the fact that I found it by contributing to an active forum. It is this sort of active process that is key to reducing the number of haystacks we need to laboriously look through.
There is a *huge* opportunity in the software field for enabling source/authority, as well as data analysis on what should get our attention (and by extension, what should not). As you point out, RSS feed readers are crying for it
They don't distinguish between the rare and miraculous appearance of a new item in an occasional journal and the latest click-fodder from Slashdot. They don't even sort your RSS feeds according to the sites that you click-through the most.
The current spate of RSS feed-reading tools is missing a major feature: None of them (Bloglines, Google Reader, NetNewsWire, etc.) provide help with answering the major focus problem, "Which feeds should I pay attention to?" They are great at collection and some simple organizing, but that's just creating a bunch of haystacks. They still require us to laboriously look through each to find the needles (i.e., to assess value).
And doing some simple analysis shouldn't be that hard.
More here if you're interested: Information provenance - the missing link between attention, RSS feeds, and value-based filtering: http://ideamatt.blogspot.com/2007/01/information-provenance-missing-link.html
for information.. it learns from my habits and shows me what I need to see. I can always amend it if things change (or if certain flag words arise), but until they do it cleans out all the crap
This seems to roll up nicely under the heading of the need for extraordinary navigation.
We're all amassing enormous libraries of data. Information is pouring in, some of it we care about, some of it we don't. I think what Cory's talking about here is the fate of information that we care about in general but don't care about at the moment (ie: we'd like to ignore it until it becomes relevant).
We need a sensible, extraordinary navigational system which helps the things we care about at the moment rise to the surface. Whether it's coming from email, RSS, posted to our favorite sites, tagged on someone's blog, or even magnetically affixed to our refrigerator at home, wouldn't it be nice if there was a site (or something, it could be a glowing orb) that helped what's relevant come to the surface.
Sort of the way gmail shows relevant ads and other links but without all the potential for corruption by a corporate monolith.
As someone mentioned earlier, there are companies who are tackling this issue.
My company, ClearContext, provides tools for prioritizing and managing email more efficiently within Outlook, including an unsubscribe feature not unlike what you describe. Intel has studied the issue of Information Overload and found that they are losing a billion dollars annually to lost productivity. They are posting their solutions to the issue on the IT@Intel blog. As the volume and costs of interruptions you describe increase, we're going to have to turn to technology to help solve the issue.
Let's be clear that I am not talking about social revolution in the political sense!
For example a geographically dispersed "society" of 9 million people has taken part in a "revolutionary" change to computer telephony by using Skype. They specifically altered their behaviour in a step change from the telephone line to the computer sound card.
The social revolution that needs to take place to allow us to ignore things needs a simplitying mechanism so that we can rate the authority of a piece of information.
Here is an example. I need to know about the possible effects of radiation emitted by wifi systems in schools. I do an on-line search and get millions of results - which ones can I ignore?
This is where it gets hard - the subset of data I will look at depends whether I am a disinterested scientist, a concerned parent or a supplier of wifi hardware. (I could be all three of course) So it's not just choosing to ignore too much information it is deciding on what type of information I want to see.
I don't see existing ranking systems evolving into making this sort of decision. What we need is something entirely new - a simple user interface into rule driven expert systems.
Careful about stretching the evolution comparison too far.
What we all need is an enhanced ability to ignore clutter and focus. This needs a revolutionary change, that is a socially driven step change in specific behaviour of individuals rather than an evolutionary change, which would be random and depend on differential survival.
The one thing that the present generation of search software doesn't do well is to measure the quality and authority of information. You need to be able to rank your information sources by credibility and authority to make sure you are ignoring the irrelevant ones
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Email is my alpha and omega, my file-system and social register, my backup and my memoir. If I need to find a document, I don't search my hard-drive; I search my email for the copy I sent to someone when it was done. I sometimes write novels on email, sending out the day's pages to a mailing list of well-wishers who keep me honest, nudging me if I miss a page. Version control? Who needs it? Just find all the copies I sent or received and order them by date!
Bunhill Cemetery is just down the road from my flat in London. It’s a handsome old boneyard, a former plague pit (“Bone hill” -- as in, there are so many bones under there that the ground is actually kind of humped up into a hill). There are plenty of luminaries buried there -- John “Pilgrim’s Progress” Bunyan, William Blake, Daniel Defoe, and assorted Cromwells. But my favorite tomb is that of Thomas Bayes, the 18th-century statistician for whom Bayesian filtering is named.
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