The "Archive" Button Can be Your In Box's Best Friend

You practically can't open your RSS reader or spend a day on a social network of your choice without running into complaints about email. Nobody likes it. Everybody says they have too much of it. People gloat over mass deletions of unread items, or sporting a full in box four or five figures deep. Some people take vacations from it or swear they'll pound through their to-read list in what could be an eventually futile journey toward the improbable in box zero. But for many of those people, it's likely the impenetrable in box is symptomatic of something else - the inability to make a decision the email requires, or the option to escape a discussion and call it complete.

When I joined Google last fall, I anticipated my corporate in box exploding. A notorious information-driven company with cool words in the lexicon such as "centithread", I imagined finally crossing over from my "I'll get to every single message, I promise," mentality, to accepting defeat. But this hasn't been the case. As I had before I joined, the email box has been no bigger a challenge than handling one's updates in Google Reader, or seeing all mentions on Google+ and Twitter.

This is helped by having a practical "always on" schedule, enabling messages to be consumed or responded to from the nearest Android phone or tablet, and the laptop is practically another limb, but the best tool for making sure I don't get lost in a torrent of email, beyond discretion in consuming tangential mailing lists, is the "Archive" button in Gmail.

The "Archive" button is pretty straight forward. If you have determined that an email message or its resulting thread no longer needs any action from you, and shouldn't take in box attention, you just hit the button and it is moved out of your in box. It's not deleted outright, meaning the thread can pop back up again if a new message arrives, and it's still discoverable in search, so you don't have to worry about being able to find it again if you change your mind later.

About 18 months ago, I talked about how one has to hone their stream in what is being perceived as an "attention" crisis, and that the onus is on us to read fast, process fast and decide fast what requires action and what does not. Information overload can be overcome with filtering what you take in, and where you participate. When to archive threads and when to extend threads requires that same level of precision. Guess rightly and you are able to get the right information to the right people at the right time with the smallest amount of effort. Guess wrongly and you could find yourself distracted by off-topic content and miss the important information amid a sea of comparable noise.

If you're a Gmail user, you probably know Google bumped up its storage capacity to more than 10 gigabytes apiece, so the issue of how you manage your email is less about can you store it all, because you probably can, but if you can manage it all. Using the archive button well is a key part of email in box survival.

Disclosures: I work at Google, and naturally, I use Gmail at home and at work.

Information Streams Accelerating the Attention Crisis

More people are creating more content of more types and sharing it with more connections in more places than ever before - not just text, but photos, audio and video as well. Every second of every day comes with more opportunities to be off task, distracted, and interrupted - with something new fighting for your attention. It might be the arrival of new e-mail, or a new RSS feed, a bombardment of new tweets, a text, or a push notification, but the interruptions are increasing - forcing you to make a choice oh where to put your attention and how to use your time.

A never-ending stream of updates on your favorite social networking sites may be full of interesting links to check out from your friends, with photos of where they are that day, and location updates telling you exactly what they were doing.

You are likely being bombarded with new demands on your time and your attention that weren't there last year, and if you were one of the elite few who had opted in to this interruption firehose a year or so ago, there is no doubt the velocity is stronger than ever, and there is no end in sight - for the tap continues to be opened.

You Are Constantly Optimizing Your Streams for Relevance

As this firehose of information sprays forth, you might think it is simply an increase in noise - that the same amount of information relevant to you today is the same amount that was relevant to you months ago, years ago. But it's not true - because as humans, we are catering all our streams to our own interests. Consciously or subconsciously, we are making deliberate choices to connect to the "right" people, to follow the "right" sites, to opt into the "right" discussions, to engage in the "right" e-mail threads, and to click on links that we believe are relevant for what we want to discover or how we want to be entertained. So this noise, even if it is still noise, is getting honed and massaged - and it is increasing the relevant signal in an ever mounting shriek, like the whistled warning of an oncoming freight train.

This combination - the dramatic increase in consumable content and diversity of sources, along with the human desire to be connected to the "right" people and "right" subject matter - practically ensures that the increase in personally relevant information is growing, if not in an exponential way, a linear way.

Simply put, the total number of personally relevant pieces of content to consume each day is much higher than it was 1 year or 2 years ago, and will likely be 5 to 10 times higher 2 years down the road.

We need to find ways to handle this deluge.

Early Adopters Showing Signs of Early Fatigue?

For those of us who are digitally connected and active, we are feeling this in acute fashion. Despite improved software tools to help us accomplish tasks, practically all of us feel we are busier than we were last year, and the year prior. We feel there are more tasks that need completing, and that we are actually falling further behind. And we are constantly being interrupted - our every task seeing its schedule hole punched like swiss cheese, as one turns to each incoming beep on the smartphone or software alert that indicates there are new messages in front of us that quite possibly could demand our attention - now.

As humans, the way we are dealing with this onslaught of personally relevant information manifests itself in a few visible ways. Some of us feel as if we are suffering from constant short term memory loss. We can't answer questions about shows we have seen or blog posts we may have read. We may scrunch up our face and look quizzically as friends remind us of updates they may have seen on social sites that they swear we saw, but we can't remember.

Social Gestures A Shortcut to Save Time and Move On

For those of us who once may have been active blog commenters across a wide variety of sites, we are commenting less, and when we do, we are usually writing shorter comments. The two big exceptions to total comments, of course, are Facebook and Twitter, the latter of which forces brevity - it's practically the iPod Nano of the writing craft. In exchange for our once lengthy and on-topic discussions, we are taking shortcuts. We might simply be clicking a "like" button to signal we saw the content and approved of it. We might want to toss a bread crumb of a social gesture the author's way - to share it, to retweet it, and move along quickly to the next thing, because there's always something bigger and better to take our attention away around the corner.

The very time we take to consume the media we're handed is like being passed a ticking time bomb. If something is deemed too long, or isn't immediately rewarding, we might just close our window, or decide to TL;DR the whole thing. There's even a Web site for that very purpose now.

There Is No Off Button. Ever.

The attention crisis is with us at all times and in all places. It is clear. No longer can we simply turn off our computer screens and relax with a good book, or a magazine, or see our favorite show, and avoid interruption. For at the same time, our smartphones are in a state of constant connectivity. They beep and chirp to let us know of new e-mail, new text messages, new phone calls, or even chat pings from Google Talk. They practically beg to be held and coddled at every moment, as we practice partial attention - holding the phone or laptop with the TV or radio on the in background. We glance down at our phones at stop lights or in traffic to see the latest Twitter mentions or if any of the newest e-mails require immediate action, because we fear both being out of touch and falling even further behind than we know we already are.

So what is being done? There has to be a breaking point, at which people's unfinished projects and mediocre work products, the result of constant interruptions, distractions, and scraping under the deadline, red eyed and fatigued, take their toll. There will need to be a trade off, either through the recognition that something will be missed, something will not be finished, or that we need to turn to a higher power, to artificial intelligence to help us surface the best and to ignore the rest. We cannot any longer rely solely on our ability to read fast, process fast and decide fast, to blast through the day's content and come out the other side fully intact. And if we are superhuman and still swear that this is possible, the demands will be even more difficult in coming months and years.

Information overload is passé. It's truly not an issue of too much information in general - but moreso an issue of too much relevant information and our inability to filter out the noise automatically to get to the good stuff every single time. Therein lies the opportunity - the opportunity to fight the attention crisis head-on. Whoever gets this right, whoever can help you to eliminate the crisis, to find the best stuff, always, and treat you like an individual, not just a clone of people like you, wins. And if you know it or not, you are already winning, because there is more relevant content than ever. Can you become superhuman and get it all?

One more thing. How many times were you interrupted in reading this post?

Can You Filter for Quality News Amidst Instant Analysis?

With real-time news and distribution increasingly becoming the norm for many product launches and events, the interpreters of the news who pass their findings your way don't often have additional information that was gleaned as exclusive. As events are live streamed directly to the public, or presentations are mass broadcast to large groups simultaneously, those headlining the news are armed not with inside sources and first person quotes, but instead with immediate analysis of the events to try and put their own unique spin on history, separating themselves from their peers.

Nearly three years ago, I wrote a post titled Launching Products in the Age of Instant Analysis, highlighting the tech media's instantaneous interpretation of products like Google Finance and semi-regular introductions from Apple. You could later see tech bloggers swarm around Cuil and Microsoft's Origami platform, declaring each of them as failures, fairly accurately.

In the ensuing time, news has gotten even more rapid, and even more participants are helping to broadcast events, not just through their blogs and publications, but on Facebook, Twitter and many other social media properties. Those that attend live gatherings get an edge over their competition through speed of publishing, speed of transmission of photos and videos, higher quality videos, a better angle, or through an innovative use of a new Web service. We saw this with the recent Nexus One announcement from Google, and will inarguably see it again this Wednesday, when Steve Jobs entertains a hungry press corp looking for the latest from Apple.

Wednesday's entertainment will be much like many similar events before it, no doubt. Scads of gadget bloggers and Macintosh faithful will be there, flanked by general tech reporters, and the mainstream press. There may be a QuickTime stream, and if not, the absence of said stream will be made fairly irrelevant thanks to near-immediate live blogging, best exemplified by the work at Engadget or MacRumors Live in years past. Other sites will try to do the same, but to choose their work over the seasoned pros should only be done out of compassion by family members or significant others of the writers themselves.

Essentially, as Steve Jobs and his team flip through each successive Keynote slide, or walk through each carefully rehearsed product demo, those waiting and watching will all find out at the same time. The news you see or read through your computer screen will not be substantively less accurate or less speedily discovered than by those who were actually there. The press corp, in an effort to drive home their own relevancy and highlight their value through a key thing called "access", will drive home their recaps of the proceedings. Those driven by the quantity of posts will give each major product or feature its own story. Quotes off the cuff may be spun as insight themselves, and others will simultaneously post how each introduction will place in history, or judge its success or failure relative to the meteoric expectations they drove themselves. Subsequent stories will fawn over the first views of the product at stores, we will see glorious unboxing videos, disassembly of the parts, and estimates to total costs and product margins. Speculation will ensue as to whether the company built too many machines or not enough, if it's taking too long to reach customers, or if they priced the product too high. (They never complain that it's too cheap, after all)

All these angles and all this spin from all these places... While in the past, media properties were judged by their ability to get access to individuals and find things out that were not known by anyone else, or before they were supposed to be aired, the flattening of the media and the measurement of what some would say are the wrong metrics (be it page views, retweets or whatever your favorite statistic of the day is), have delivered a scenario by which there is more noise than ever, and as consumers, we must filter like mad.

Robert Scoble, a peer, and fellow geek and curator, said that he will be skipping out on Wednesday's news, and watching the news ink feeding frenzy as it seeps through our computer screens. His goal won't be necessarily to report on the news, which will be common knowledge as soon as he starts typing, but to find the best interpretations of the news from his favorite sources. He publicly will be doing something we all must learn to do - separating the news discovery artists from the news spin artists. With tools like Twitter and other networks making it ever easier to hit the publish button, our ability to screen, filter and decide what information is good for us is going to be increasingly tested.

mytweetsense Makes Twitter Relevant, Personal and Mobile

When you follow as many people as I do on Twitter and other social networks, there is clearly the potential to feel as if you are going to miss something if you are not continuously connected. The sheer waterfall of information rushing into your Twitter client of choice is also often a confusing mess, with status updates mixed in with location check-ins, and actual, real, news, photos or video. Twitter's recent move to offer users Lists, helping to group relevant people, is a step in the right direction, but it still doesn't solve the issue of relevancy - finding information that is personally applicable to you, based on your own interests. Yesterday, my6sense, best known for their iPhone application that uses digital intuition to surface the best news for you from RSS, introduced mytweetsense, applying their strong digital intuition to your social streams.

As an advisor to the company, I have had access to mytweetsense for some time, and it is the first time I have really found Twitter useful as a news source, rivaling RSS. The product learns from my own activity, seeing what topics and sources I like to read, and surfacing the very best tweets from the more than 10,000 people I follow and bringing them to the top.



mytweetsense surfaces the best Twitter content to me on the iPhone
I have set up mytweetsense to look only for tweets that contain links. my6sense then presents relevant tweets, with links, as part of my news stream, either alongside my RSS updates, or in a folder dedicated to social streams. Clicking on a relevant tweet then presents an excerpt and headline from the shared link, much like you see on Facebook or other sites.

The idea behind mytweetsense is fairly simple, even if the implementation is hard, which explains why my6sense is the first to debut such a personally relevant filter for Twitter. mytweetsense does more than just surface interesting headlines and links, but it also parses the downstream URL and surfaces content that is relevant to me. That means that in a sea of @replies and personal conversations, mytweetsense can find me links on items I am most interested in, such as Google, the Real-time Web, Apple and iTunes.

Communicating in the Age of Streams: Ubiquity, Multiplicity, Visibility

The rate at which information is being produced shows no sign of slowing down, and humans are adapting to the onslaught of this so-called firehose by having shorter attention spans and filtering out information they aren't much interested in, so that it fades into the background as noise. In parallel, information is getting ever decentralized, and conversations are taking place in an infinite number of places, which makes the task of participating in every relevant conversation a practical impossibility. As this has happened, the model of dedicated Web sites, and even blogs, can look extremely outdated - aiming to act as centralized destinations in a world of streams. Edelman vice president Steve Rubel, who recently moved his blog to a lifestreaming format, based on Posterous, explained at Blog World Expo how he takes on the stream and helps his clients gain visibility in the fast-moving world.

Rubel, who created the highly popular MicroPersuasion blog back in 2004 and updated it multiple times a day before moving to the lifestream earlier this year, said "we are reaching a critical breaking point" when it comes to the information firehose, adding, "information is going to continue to scale, but human attention doesn't scale, so we have to think about how each of us manages it."

You no doubt have seen some of the more aggressive ways to tackle information overload including "In Box Zero", "Mark All as Read Day" or even "E-mail bankruptcy" - all essentially differing forms of throwing in the towel and admitting failure. Steve quoted recent studies showing that the average person in the US visits 111 different domains in a month, and approximately 2,500 Web pages a month, as people are making choices in terms of where they spend their time, and what pieces of information they choose to respond to. And one of those places that usually isn't getting a lot of their attention? Company Web sites and old-fashioned blogs.

Steve suggested that one of the major reasons that Twitter exploded was because it centralized all these diverse conversations and put them in one place, also leaning on short forms of communication, adding that on average, people only read about 20 percent of the Web page before moving on. Much of the reason for their shorter attention spans? More data, coming ever more quickly.

"Everything is moving faster now, whether you like it or not," he said. "It's like a sushi duck moving past at 100 miles an hour with 1,000 different options. How do you make sure you get selected and stand out?"

Instead of fighting against the stream and forcing people to come back to the originating hub, Steve started to think that maybe his blog "didn't matter as much any more", and appeared "archaic". Now, he is posting content, via Posterous, to his lifestream and also each of the spokes (like Flickr, Delicious, etc.) and participating where that content gainst traction - essentially creating a very customizable hub and spoke model that has his own personal brand and the flexibility to put the right content in the right place.

For companies and businesses looking to take on the streams, Steve highlighted three major imperatives to not only just broadcast, but to ensure quality engagement - including ubiquity, multiplicity and diversity of message, and finally, discovery and visibility. The new lifestream-powered Web sites would enable companies and brands to be "everywhere stakeholders are spending time", and enable the opportunity for different stories in different venues in different formats, avoiding a one size fits all approach.

The stream is real. Whether you call it the flow, as Stowe Boyd has, or the River of News, as Dave Winer has, the firehose is pushing more data our way faster than ever. IT could be that the lifestream is an answer.

For more on lifestreaming, make sure to check out Mark Krynsky's Lifestreamblog.com.

Parse.ly Spices Up the News Based On Your Interest Filters

I am enjoying seeing the growth in Web services tailored to finding the very best news just for me. From My6Sense's attempt to only show me the best news, and hiding the less-important items, to Lazyfeed's topics-based blog search engine, we've recently seen two interesting approaches to cutting through information overload and finding the best data. A new invite-only beta service, called Parse.ly, claims to offer "fresh content" with "minimal garnish", and, leveraging my interests, gives me the highest-ranked stories, derived not just from my leanings, but how strongly I find myself aligned with specific topics. The result is another news source with an outstanding signal to noise ratio.

If you are among the lucky few who has thus far obtained access to Philadelphia-based Parse.ly (I am betting the best way is to follow their Twitter account), you start by entering terms you want to find news on, and dragging them to boxes that signify your intensity of interest. The five boxes range from "Most" to "Extremely", "Very", "Moderately" and "Somewhat", in descending order.


Prioritizing My News In Parse.ly
Per my usual approach, I filled the boxes with tech terms, and deigned to see if Parse.ly could find me new, interesting stories about the topics I am most interested in. And it came through - no question.

Each of the buckets ("Somewhat" to "Most") gained a numerical score, from 2 to 10. As a result if a blog post had two of my "10 point words" in its title or excerpt, it would have 20 points, and be pushed to the top of the results queue. Higher yet would be a story on Google around Pubsubhubbub and RSS, which weighed in at 28 points, sporting two 10 point words and an 8 pointer. Like traditional feed readers, Parse.ly shows the title of the story and the date, but it also includes a short summary and, yes, the post's numerical score. Sorting by score shows the highest ranking results.


My Starred Items In A Parse.ly Reading Pane

How Stories Got Scored Based On My Preferences
If you click on a story in the standard view, an excerpt is displayed in the reading pane, which also features a "Score Explanation". And if you click on the story itself, a new window will open with a Parse.ly share bar, prompting you to either save the story for later viewing, or share it to a myriad of other social networks.


The Parse.ly Sharebar In Action on eWeek
Parse.ly clearly states that its focus is all about the content and minimal when it comes to garnish (or design). That's absolutely the case. The product is reminiscent of GMail and Google Reader with its simple interface and the ability to star items, or show only read and unread items. You can also archive old items or delete them, just like you would for old e-mails and RSS feeds.

I am eager to see Parse.ly open up and let people get into the product, for while I have plenty of places to get news, Parse.ly has among the best I've ever seen in terms of quality. The company even says it could be a solid alternative to Google Alerts. Not a single spam blog was found, a testament to Parse.ly's selection from 50,000 different sources. The option to share out to other networks will also make it an interesting part of the social ecosystem.

Podcast: TheSocialGeeks: Stop Being Lazy, and Filter

In the latest edition of The Social Geeks, Chris Miller, Wayne Sutton, Jeff(isageek) and I talk about new introductions on Lazyfeed, Google Reader, and how to interact with multiple communities on differing social networks. Meanwhile, have we reached the saturation point where we no longer have to look for more sources of news? I say no, but stress that filters can play a big role in getting the best data. You can also find the original copy on Mevio.com.

Audio: SXSW 2009 Panel on Beyond Aggregation

Although it has been a few months since SXSW 2009 came and went, rich media from the event is continuing to trickle forth. The major reason I even attended the annual tech shindig was to participate on a panel discussing the issue of going "Beyond Aggregation", sitting alongside other folks you might know, including Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb, who moderated, Gabe Rivera of Techmeme, Melanie Baker of PostRank and Micah Baldwin of Lijit.

Melle helpfully found an MP3 Podcast file from the panel, and posted it to her site today. Still no video, but at this pace, it could be another six months or so for that to leak out, although 100 interviews posted a short video piece with me just after the panel had concluded, and it got written up by Phil Glockner that day.

Our discussion ranged from how to discover new data, to whether communities are growing outside the world of tech, and whether you can measure influence. You can download the 1 hour long audio clip and listen at your leisure here:

Download MP3 File (20 MB)

Inbound Marketing Summit Preso: There Is No Information Overload

There Is No Information Overload: Finding a Signal In the Noise

View more presentations from louisgray.

At 4:25 today in San Francisco, I will be presenting at the Inbound Marketing Summit on tackling the perception of information overload. How can those of us in Marketing, tasked at discovering and participating in microcommunities where our prospects, partners and customers, reside, get a handle on all the data, and find the most relevant bits?

With only 20 minutes, we'll see what we can do. There's no time limit for you to flip through these slides, of course. Go to it.

Are We Too Connected to Social Media?

By Ken Stewart of ChangeForge (Twitter/FriendFeed)


Do you ever feel like you are too wired? Do you find yourself using a password manager to keep up with passwords to the dozens of social media and web sites to which you have subscribed? Dan Keldsen posted a very interesting piece that really got me thinking on linking all of these various social media types together to form multi-dimensional and very personal points-of-presence (POP’s) for every individual.

Dan writes:

They are a meta-meta-aggregator in the sense that they are aggregating (collecting) information from multiple sources, and that their underlying data sources can also be aggregating information from multiple sources (such as ZoomInfo). This extends the reach and richness of the information that they are able to pull back on behalf of users of their system, in a similar fashion to the functionality of federated search or universal search in more traditional enterprise search.

In an ideal world, or at least with the smarter salespeople and marketers, such information will help to weed out who the appropriate people are to engage in more targeted discussions, and to engage in informed conversations of the "2.0 age" rather than in continuing to hammer out cold-calls and blanket, un-personalized (or badly personalized) mass-marketing.

Though Dan's article is referring specifically to a product called SalesView by InsideView (a CRM mash-up that aggregates social media information about potential clients), I can't help but notice we seem to be drowning in a sea of social media outlets. For instance, Twitter is interesting and a social medium to which many people subscribe. However, it begs a question in the context of its underlying purpose, “What is the end-game for this type of social experiment?”

[Dan contends] social networking is not purely about person-to-person connections, or in providing a virtual watercooler (or virtual voyeur perhaps) view into your "friends" (peers, co-workers, etc.) but also for the ability of participants IN the network to use the data within that network to become smarter in the ways that they interact with the people in that network.

Bluntly put, information about people abounds through many different channels, all of which were never before captured outside of family photo albums or epitaphs. Now that all of this information exists in a connected world, it is becoming a very relevant question to ask, “What can be done with all of this information about you? Is your information usable or abusable in its new formats?”

All of this latent "social information" is buried in the heap of individual silos both inside and outside of the control of any one [corporation], even deeper ... than "normal" electronic information is.

InsideView has a few ideas, according to Dan, albeit a bit Minority Report-ish. However, let's assume we all have the best intentions of using this information to the benefit of mankind; it makes me wonder whether this medium will connect us in ways never before dreamed or allow us to conduct plastic surgery at-will to our public persona? And just who decides someone, or some organization, should be granted access to a given network of POP's?
For now, everyone is having fun, and rightly so. By all accounts, this is a golden age of connectedness not seen in centuries past. Even as we marvel at our own magnificence, I can't help but step back, take a breath and ask if we are all just a little too connected?

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Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. To learn more about Ken, visit his about page. You may also find Ken on FriendFeed, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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The World. The Web. Just That Much Smaller.

By Ken Stewart of ChangeForge.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)

In July of this year, Google announced on its blog the Web was a big place. That's probably not much of surprise to anyone reading this.

• In 1998, Google's index contained 26 million pages.
  
• By 2000, the index reached 1 billion pages.
  
• This year, Google announced its engines have discovered over 1 trillion unique URLs.

As if you needed more evidence, U.S. companies produced over 4.3 trillion pages from document output devices last year alone. Information is being produced and consumed at staggering rates.

Recently, one speaker I heard commented on the last century's rapidly spiraling rate of information growth.

He stated the amount of information up until 1900 could be measured as a 1 inch bar on a graph. He went on to say the information gathered from 1900 to 1950 could be measured as a 2 inch bar on the same graph, while the information presently available would measure as high as the Washington Monument. That would be 6,665.5 inches, or 555 feet, 5.5 inches tall.

Connecting the Dots:

I have discussed some of these trends in the technology and business worlds – and specifically how the ever-increasing amount of information has become hard to digest:

The true winners will be those who are able to connect the dots and fund innovations geared to lessen the visible complexity, enhance efficiencies, and/or create real-dollar cost savings.

In fact, IBM would say most of their customers are concerned with consumability: the abstraction of complex technology to the end-user, while surfacing only enough of the interface necessary to help the end-user achieve their objectives.

Perhaps you have heard the phrase, "I don't care how the car starts, I just want to stick the key in and be able to go get my latte."

What You Were Looking For:

How do you find what it is you need on the web?

Of course I started this article with one of the most prevalent ways in which people search for information, Google. Google has brought such an impact to our world in the last decade, the company's name has become a verb – synonymous with search.

While there are perhaps many examples of how complex technology is helping you, one recently caught my attention - that of social media.

While Google found an unserved opportunity in search, the long tail of software has evolved from dozens of markets with millions of users to that of millions of markets with dozens of users (source, IBM GTO, 2008).

Social media is the logical conclusion of all of the voices attempting to be heard, to be found, and ultimately seeking resonance.

And so conversations continue across media outlets, blogs and the Web-space in general - proliferating with exponential frequency. Content is being created, being expanded upon, and being echoed back.

Turn Down the Volume:

Simply searching through Google, or the like, just wasn't enough. Even early adopters would even have trouble scouring such a wide swath of content in search of meaning and connection.

With such a volume of information, more refined mechanisms of search had to be created; more meaningful conversations could only be had when people were connected to one another, and those involved would need to be able to dial-up or dial-down the amount of information being consumed – based upon individual need or desire.

What I have witnessed is one writer beginning a thought while another finishes it – without even knowing the other had started the conversation in the first place. In another instance, you might see a small community of bloggers holding almost identical conversations to one another without knowledge or thought of the other.

The Connection:

All it takes is a connection – something or someone to draw a line between the dissonant parties. Thus the power of the web, and social media specifically, are realized in small but meaningful chunks.

With the advent of services such as Twitter and FriendFeed the momentum of discovery has accelerated, and even new bloggers like me are able to gain access to meaningful connections after only a relatively short time.

There remains much work to be done before these services can satisfy the needs of the masses, but the foundations have been laid. After all, the Web is a big place; but with your help, your voice, your connection it can become just that much smaller.

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Ken Stewart's blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

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