{"id":1336,"date":"2011-10-28T08:53:00","date_gmt":"2011-10-28T07:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/2011\/10\/overcoming-information-overload\/"},"modified":"2011-10-31T23:45:28","modified_gmt":"2011-10-31T22:45:28","slug":"overcoming-information-overload","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/2011\/10\/overcoming-information-overload\/","title":{"rendered":"Overcoming information overload"},"content":{"rendered":"

The keynote this morning from Kevin Anderson (@kevglobal<\/a>) and Suw Charman-Anderson (@suw<\/a>) – journalists and technologists (http:\/\/charman-anderson.com\/<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Kevin kicks off: Journalists and librarians dealing with many of the same issues – helping people navigate, interpret and understand information. Going to talk about some of the challenges in this area. First playing Xerox video on ‘information overload’ – http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=CXFEBbPIEOI<\/a><\/p>\n

Eric Schmidt noted that we are now creating huge amounts of information (5 exabytes every 2 days is the quote, but see disagreement with this figure at http:\/\/www.readwriteweb.com\/cloud\/2011\/02\/are-we-really-creating-as-much.php<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Amount of time people spend on Facebook massively more than they spend on Newspaper web sites. Evidence that people are having problems moving to conclusions on complex stories – people move to simple narratives instead – Kevins says this equals “car crashes and celebreties”<\/p>\n

Social media offers opportunity to re-engage people and help them navigate information.<\/p>\n

We are moving from “mass” to “relevance” – e.g. not about how many followers you have on twitter, but about the relevance of what you post. Try to move from information overload (a ‘mass’ problem) and have filtered relevant information (a ‘relevance’ solution)<\/p>\n

Social media provides a way of filtering information. But social media has to be ‘social’ – you need people at the heart of this.<\/p>\n

Examples of crowdsourcing – Guardian analysis of MP expenses (http:\/\/mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk\/<\/a>), Ushahidi crowdsourcing crisis information (http:\/\/www.ushahidi.com\/<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Kevin also mentions ‘entity extraction’ – uses Calais as an example..
\nDewey D. – iphone app to manage ‘reading list’ (not in academic sense) and pulls in stories from the New York Times.<\/p>\n

Poligraft – analyses funding of politicial campaigns – you can post URLs (of political stories) to Poligraft – it goes through and identifies politicians and organisations and shows you how politicians get campaign funding etc. Tells you about the major industries funding politicians etc – gives context to political story and help make sense of it.<\/p>\n

We (journalists & librarians) have hundreds of years of doing things in a certain way – changing culture is incredibly difficult. If you have more than 5 people in the room, inertia hits …<\/p>\n

Now Suw taking the floor… to talk crowdsourcing – breaking large tasks into smaller chunks that individuals can do. Suitable tasks – computational tasks and ‘human’ tasks.<\/p>\n

Computational tasks = large datasets of computation that can be split into smaller datasets or computations – e.g. SETI@Home – this is about ‘spare cycles’ from individual’s computers they can contribute to computing power.<\/p>\n

Human tasks = tasks that humans find easy but computers find difficult; brain driven; uses participants spare time; individual errors are average away by having the same task completed by many people.<\/p>\n

Type of human tasks:<\/p>\n