Jeremiah Owyang

Jeremiah,

As always a very thoughtfull post, this ties in to information overload that Knowledge Workers have to deal with increasingly.

How to filter the value-adding Signal from RSS feeds/updates-noise? It’s inevitable to miss out on some information/news especially if you’re following developments within green fields such as Tech/Web related news, personally I have a few cornerstones, such as your blog feed for example and some mailings that I use to keep an ear to the ground, the more times I see a certain topic echoed by certain trusted sources in the know, the greater the chance of it being relevant.

@AnibalDoRosario

Great post. I especially agree that we’ll need to use filters to organize the information coming down the stream.

But I still beg the question from time-to-time whether or not Twitter and FriendFeed has caused mainstream social app design (as evidenced by Facebook’s most recent redesign) to be tailored towards a small portion of the social networking population that spends a good portion of their day using these services. Most people can’t sort through these stream-like apps because they’re not on there all day. Yes, they can use these tools you mention to help slow things down and sort through it, but that’s based on the presumption they’ll take the time (or have the time) to set those tools up. It seems to me the decision to go this design route (especially with Facebook) wasn’t caused by a groundswell of normal users, but instead a few influential people in the valley.

-CGL

I also believe that we are going to need more “navigators” … or people/systems that begin to filter and “edit” the content flows. If you look at historical patterns in prior media forms, there are people/companies that become the itermediaries that consume large amounts of information and then produce smaller outbound streams.

The Editor of a newspaper or magazine has this role … picking and choosing what goes into an “issue”. With real-time flows, I believe that we might begin to see better search solutions, or “rewteeting” services that we can subscribe to, which will then become the filters creating refined outbound feeds.

I always like to look at this as “humaneural” behaviors … where humans take on near neural behavior in having hundreds or thousands of input signals, and then generate far fewer outbound signals.

The interesting problem is how do we find the smaller number of these filtered feeds, that provide beneficial streams of information to us … with the occassional “unanticipated” content that can cause unexpected results.

The only people who have time/desire to drink it all in are either (a) those who are bored and merely killing time on the Web, or (b) those whose job is directly tied to their being “tuned in”.

While many social media mavens *think* it’s their job to be tuned in, it’s usually rather a hobby and the latter group is much smaller than the former.

For the majority of us, the social tools and processes already mostly exist to filter this river of information — they’re our employees, partners, customers, friends and family. I’ve learned that as I get busier, it’s ok to neglect my RSS reader and twitter stream — somehow all the important stuff gets to me anyway.

This post inspired me to write a quick how-to on sorting through the stream on the new Facebook. Hope it’s helpful to some people. http://tinyurl.com/czrk2q

-CGL

I think that the answer is diversionary projects. The user needs to find a way to control the input rather than be flooded with information.

The secret in my opinion is to decide what information that you want, then have it brought to you. Many are using our tool Techrigy SM2 to filter & aggregate info on topics & bring it to them.

I hope that your trip to MN is enjoyable! It’s not so cold anymore, although we still have too much snow up here.
Connie
@cbensen

Great post! This metaphor of the live stream as river is an emerging model that has great relevance. We once spoke of highways -something we ride upon -now it is all liquid – and we are submerged or…we can still ride on top and still treat it like a highway. I’ve been thinking about this concept of the social media river. Here are some recent thoughts I had:

Old media (print, radio, TV,etc.): flowed one way into pools, ponds, lakes. Information was ‘siloed’
New media (Web 2.0 enabled, web-based – sites, rss, blogs, networks, apps, widgets,etc. ): flows in all directions, it’s a great network of feedback loops, information doesn’t stop flowing.

Many of us are still using the web (including me!) as a series of closed silos or ponds – the more activated we become in the arena of Web 2.0/Social Media the deeper we go -learning to go from
riding on top of the conversational/info flow (in metaphorical boats – or tubes or just floating on top) to swimming and eventually breathing, and existing totally in that environment (like fish). It requires a new set of
lungs, a new purpose, new methods, new philosophical underpinnings.

Web 2.0 is merely the evolution of the World Wide Web. It was a place of conversation and collaboration from the start. It has always had a social purpose, a relational or human aim. (see Tim Berner Lee’s book: Weaving The World Wide Web)

The river = is the web based conversation/info stream that is enabled by Social Media technologies – the river as metaphor is a way of using the Web – it is possible to not submerge yourself in it, and the business world often confuses fishing with becoming a fish.

Unique ways of relating in the new river: in old media there was a preacher and an audience. In new media -everyone is submerged (or riding on top) in a flow of mutual dialogue. Gates are crashed, hierarchies are diminished, the feedback and comments is now equally as important as the initial content.

-networks, communities and horizontal relational structures are now the means by which we travel within the river – like ‘schools’ of fish -learning from each other -and traveling in rings of mutual trust – we are herds, flocks, tribes fixed on singular niches, passions, causes, shared values, missions, purpose. Your fellow fish and you move in an awareness of each other – often moving as one body.

-there are undercurrents in the river, there are bottom-feeders, there are rapids, there are shallow areas where those riding on top are in great peril, there are waterfalls, there are tributaries (mobile web? etc?), the river is going somewhere, the river dumps into the ocean/sea eventually (this is called convergence -where the web merges (via new technology) with life and the web so intertwined that the world will be a whole new submerged landscape (complete with sunken ships and great white sharks, as well as beautiful coral reefs,etc…)

Many people right now have just noticed the river. Some people are drowning. Some people are teaching others how to ride on top. Other people are becoming fish and learning how to swim in ‘schools’. Media, education, business, causes, all these will find that these ‘schools’ are the most progressive places to advance into the future of their organizations.

The river is: conversation, information, dialogue, community, social technology, decentralized, demassified, hyper-everything, (see Leonard Sweet’s book Soul Tsunami)

-shalom!

Jonathan

Thanks! I'm doing the best I can, and wrote this post sometime between my 9 meetings today.