Eluma | Blog

The big 4 announced they are banding together to form a new consortium, the Information Overload Research Group (IORG) to address exactly the same problems around information overload that we've been talking about and working on here at Eluma.

The resulting flurry of news items, blog posts, and conversations has been impressive.  We're glad to see folks waking up to the impact of information overload on productivity, for both the mainstream online world, as well as for the web 2.0 hyper-connected crowd.

One thing most of us need to pay attention to is to try to improve our self-discipline.  Just because I have a new email, or my Blackberry buzzes, or my laptop is open at home at the dinner table, doesn't mean I have to check it right now.

But from a technology perpective, we should demand better tools.  As we've been saying all along, the right answer is not to limit our data streams.  Instead, demand that technology providers work on better tools to collect, aggregate, organize, filter, and display information, so that *each* person gets the right (most relevant) information presented to her, at the right time, in the right format.

If some percentage of developers take this as a wake up call to stop working on that web 2.0 social website for (insert plural noun here) and instead work on helping to alleviate this problem, we'll all be better off.