Too Much Information?

Collaborative tools are wonderful; they allow the expansion rate of information to increase at exponential rates. This has the potential to be incredibly powerful, but harnessing all of this information is a tremendous challenge.

Searching (collating) was the first step. It is omnipresent now, but its usefulness is limited by the user's capacity to know what to search and to evaluate or assimilate the information returned by the search. This limitation is significant. As the information generation rate expands, the user's limitations remain the sam eand the gap between the two increases (or the rate of return on new information diminishes.)

Aggregating and evaluating the collated results is an emerging technology. Firms are working on applying technologies that recognize text and that evaluate it in context to aggregate and assimilate information from multiple sources to help address the user's limited ability to process, assimilate and evaluate information. Unfortunately, even this technology is still limited by the user's ability to know what information to search for.

Predictive information collation, aggregation and delivery is an area that designers should focus on. Pandora (an internet radio station that you can link to from this blog) is a part of the music genome project and is a greta example of an emerging predictive technology. Using Pandora, you start with a song or artist that you like and pandora will play you that song (or a song by that artist) and will ask you to confirm that this is what you meant. Once you have done this, your work is (largely) over. Pandora then suggests to you other songs by different artists that you should like based upon your initial preference. This technology is still limited (because the number of factors that go into determining preferences are myriad) but it is a great directional arrow toward the future of predictive information delivery.

The funny thing is that this is really a return to classical technology. What is a magazine other than a collection of information elements (articles) that an editor or group of editors predict you will like based upon your initial preference statement (that you have chosen to buy the magazine).