Posts Tagged ‘Information Overload’

The Context Organizer Method

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
Context Organizer’s power to visualize critical information is akin to creating on the spot maps to help you effortlessly navigate through web pages.  In an instant, large amounts of information are simplified and reduced to the most essential storyline, which is easy to understand and learn.
 
Context Organizer summaries simplify complex text into an organized, easy-to-understand visual format.
 
At a glance,you see the essential keywords and summaries. You do not need to read the full text of  web pages, emails and documents in order to know what they contain.
 
Context Organizer summaries facilitate the rapid discovery of ideas, simplify complex content, inspire creativity, and save enormous amounts of time and effort. With a simple visual presentation, users can immediately focus on the critical information and make decisions.
 
Context Organizer’s powerful filters enable easy exposure of desired information. The Short Summary instantly spotlights the most important conclusions saving you time and effort by discovering critical findings and eliminating information overload.
 
Convenient note taking allows you to effortlessly text mine to rapidly create your own documents and notes. It is a handy tool for learning and studying.
 
Summarized Google search results save you time in reviewing and discovering the essential fragments hidden in web pages.  With Context Organizer’s review and summarization of Google search results is very fast and effortless.
 
Speed reading with Context Organizer is as simple as clicking on a button. Summaries and keywords ranked by relevance are instantly discovered and presented to you for review and note taking.
 
MindManager mind mapping is completely automated with Context Organizer. With the simple click of a button, you can instantly create a MindManager map.
 
In conclusion, Context Organizer’s power to visualize critical information is akin to creating on the spot maps to help you effortlessly navigate through web pages.  In an instant, large amounts of information are simplified and reduced to the most essential storyline, which is easy to understand and learn.
 
You can download and try out Context Organizer for free.

 

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Brain overload: device too busy

Monday, August 11th, 2008

In this age of social media, we create informational flows of near unrestrained magnitude from countless sources. In effect, the sheer amount of information threatens to hide really valuable information. 

 
How often do you feel like the student in Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoon, and are tempted to say, “Please, sir, may I please be excused? My head is full.”
 
A disk device can become so overwhelmed with Input – Output requests and at one point, it will flash some warning messages asking you to increase your storage, or defragment it, or delete unneeded files. But what can we do when our brains are overwhelmed with information?
 
In this age of social media, we create informational flows of near unrestrained magnitude from countless sources. In effect, the sheer amount of information threatens to hide really valuable information.
 
The traditional process of ‘filter-then-publish‘– done by professional editors - has been inverted to ‘publish-then-filter‘. So now instead of relying on professional editors and librarians to make recommendations, we have to become experts ourselves.
 
The curious thing about this state is that seemingly accidental recommendations from many sources often result in remarkably high quality ideassee crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe. The challenge here is seeing how quickly we can discover them in the atomized universe; this is quite time consuming, which often leads to our brain overload
 
In parallel to the free-for-all publishing world, we also see new trends for creating collaborative methods for producing both aggregated and authoritative content that takes advantage of the limitless Web sources and yet can be trusted. Examples of such trends are Wikipedia, wikis and most recently Knols. This community approach, with a peer review process, for sharing knowledge and learning, manifests our need for creating dependable and trustworthy information sources.
 
It seems that the genius of connectedness offers us too many tempting directions; from time to time, we need to reach for some authoritative content to keep us on dry land and save us from drowning in information overload.
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Context Organizer: Read Less, Learn More

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

 Summarization tools are one of the most effective ways to efficiently filter information and reduce information overload. Context Organizer is an intelligent content finder which provides the most relevant summaries. 

 
Summarization tools are one of the most effective ways to efficiently filter information and reduce information overload.
 
The reason that summarization tools are of value is that the amount of information available on the web is overwhelming. There is far more information that we can hope to process; this phenomenon is commonly called “information overload”.
 

Context Organizer is an efficiency tool, which makes reading a breeze.
Users click on the Context Organizer icon to get an instant “glance” of the most important keywords and content they are reading on the Web.
 

 

In essence, Context Organizer is an intelligent content finder which provides the most relevant summaries.  Summarization makes sense because we do not have time to read anymore. Instead, we are skimming and scanning, quickly trying to spot what is of interest to us.
 
You could try Context Organizer and see for yourself just how summarization will make your reading more effective and focused and only on the subjects of your interest.
 
 
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The Myth of Information Overload Explained

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

 The Myth of Information Overload By: Vaughan Merlyn

 "There’s something about the term “information overload” that puts the cart before the horse…  If you think of the problem as information overload you might look for a solution that cuts back on the information, and that would be a crime!"

 There is no information overload but rather there is information wealth.

Vaughan Merlyn makes the point very succinctly. We cannot think about cutting down on information consumption. This would be foolish. Rather we need more intelligent tools and practices that allow us rapid and accurate access only to information that is relevant to us.
In many ways our work with Context Organizer is focused on giving the reader the essential summary instantly and saving the time by screening out the secondary details. The reader always prefers to be exposed to the key information first before seeing all the supporting information. Such presentation favours clarity and simplicity.

 

 1-Sentence Summary*

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Information wealth or information overload?

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

"What Productivity Studies Really Show" By Gina Trapani

1-Sentence Summary*

"The longer I do this, the more I suspect that a good part of the "information overload" story is a myth cooked up by folks who don’t know how to use the internet well in order to demonize something they don’t understand."

It is commonly accepted that so called information overload ruins our life and seems to be a contagious malady. To save ourselves we should compartmentalize our time and attention by following favorite time and information management techniques.

However, since technology produces information abundantly, certainly we could better use smart applications that help us with filtering, spotlighting and contextualizing information that we are interested in.

Wealth of information is an asset not an impediment. Too much effort and attention is given to studying the so called negative impact of information wealth and not enough attention is spend on technologies capable to intelligently mine the information wealth.

Productivity is a very personal issue and with a bit of ingenuity each of us can take advantage of information wealth…

 * 1-Sentence Summary is done using Context Organizer 

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Google supports human oversight

Thursday, July 17th, 2008

 "Google De-Automates Addition of Gmail Contacts" By: Thomas Claburn

1-Sentence Summary*

In truth, Google’s decision to change the way Gmail gathers contacts isn’t so much a repudiation of automation as an acknowledgment that automation must be balanced by human oversight.

By far having Suggested Contacts where Gmail puts its auto-created addresses gives users back the control over their address book. By default, Suggested Contacts that you email regularly are automatically added to My Contacts. And if you do not like this automated step you can still choose to disable usage-based addition of contacts to My Contacts. Once you do this, no matter how many times you email an auto-added email address it won’t be moved to My Contacts.

As a result My Contacts contains the contacts you explicitly add to your address book through a manual entry, import or sync.
 
With these changes it will be much easier to clean up the address book and make it organized and functional. This is yet another step towards reducing information overload.

* 1-Sentence Summary is done using Context Organizer

 

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Jared Goralnick’s report from the inaugural Information Overload conference

Thursday, July 17th, 2008

 "Information overload solutions from a conference dedicated to the topic" By: Jared Goralnick

I’m overwhelmed with ideas from the Information Overload conference this week.  In an effort to reflect, I’ve listed some of the major stats and themes discussed for managing too much stuff.
 
I was sorry that I could not attend yesterday’s Information Overload conference in New York, but thanks to Jared’s quick report we can get a good sense of what was presented.
 
Aside of Jared’s report, for those interested in the subject, you can listen to Jonathan Spira, Jon Herlocker, and Maggie Jacksoninterview on CBC’s “The Current” aired on July 3rd, 2008.
 
  
 
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2008 is being dubbed the “year of information overload”

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

 That’s according to research firm Basex, which chose "information overload" as its 2008 "Problem of the Year."

 According to 2007 study by Basex, information overload is costly; they estimate that the costs of information overload is about $650 billion a year in the USA alone.
 
 
Interruptions consume 28% of knowledge worker’s day. One recommended solution is to use filtering tools that help users to quickly understand, prioritize and organize information. Basex argues that the human brain is not effectively wired for paying attention to multiple things at once and handling constant interruptions.
 
According to Jonathan Spira, the author of the “Information Overload: We Have Met the Enemy And He Is Us” report, we should resist the urge to immediately follow up on every e-mail, phone call or IM. Spira recommends that knowledge workers distinguish the urgent from important things before deciding on interruptions in their thought process.
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Are you drowning in information?

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

"How to Deal with Information Overload: Part I"  by: Damon Hedman

1-Sentence Summary*

 "There is more information online than any one person can ever consume, and it’s only going to get worse."

Damon rightly points out that whenever we search for information we find far too many links and that makes our choices difficult. His sensible advice is: “Only read information that is relevant to the problem at hand.” Isn’t this the goal and ambition of all Internet users?

However, the challenge here is how quickly we can find out and decide what is relevant. From personal experience I can say that summaries and keywords are very helpful tools in quickly distinguishing what may be of interest to us or just unnecessary. Summaries offer a practical shortcut to finding out if information is relevant or of no use.

 * 1-Sentence Summary is done using Context Organizer

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Information Overload Research Group Launches Its First Conference

Monday, July 14th, 2008

"Information Overload Research Group Launches with Conference in New York"

1-Sentence Summary*

The Information Overload Research Group (IORG), an industry and academic consortium dedicated to reducing information pollution, is to hold its inaugural event, a one-day conference on information overload and its impact on knowledge workers and large organizations, tomorrow at the Penn Club in New York City.

Information overload is a challenge for individuals and the work place. Many studies are devoted both to the quantification of the problem and to offering effective technologies and methods to improve productivity and lessen the stress.

 A recently created Information Overload Research Group is kicking off its first annual conference that begins on July 15th in New York. Check out the Information Overload Research Group website.

 * 1-Sentence Summary is done using Context Organizer

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