Certainly one indicator of information overload is that this item has been sitting in my “blog this” queue since October. Nonetheless, it remains an important set of insights about the data and information that is being created on a daily basis. It is an excellent update, by
the folks at the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley, of a study they first did in 1999.
In the early days of my career, we thought the problem was to capture and record the information managers needed to make effective business decisions. We’ve more than solved the capture and recording side of the problem; what we’re now working out is how to solve the problem created by that “solution.”
Feeling a bit overwhelmed by information? This site will open your eyes.
Alan Kucheck (a Borland VP)
tipped me off to this research. Perhaps this explains why he doesn’t have is own
Weblog. 😉
If you created 800 MBytes of new information last year, congratulations: You’re as prolific as the average person on the planet.
That’s a big number, but it will likely grow faster than we can imagine. This is the
“information tsunami” that we refer to from time-to-time. Although MyST and MySmartChannels are far from the solution to this rapid per-capita growth of content, they do represent useful tools for chipping away at many of the information problems that are best addressed by lose-coupling applications.
See Also
- How Much Information? 2003
This study is an attempt to estimate how much new information is created each year.